


House of Cards

by FernWithy



Series: Narrow Path [3]
Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-21
Updated: 2013-03-29
Packaged: 2017-12-05 23:34:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 38,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/729161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FernWithy/pseuds/FernWithy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the second Quarter Quell ends with battle, Peeta Mellark is taken back to the Capitol to be broken.  Rating for violence, especially in later chapters.  EDITED for compliance with other work.  9/20/2015.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

****

**Part One: Prisoners**

  
  
  
** Chapter 1 **  
I stay in the shower until someone decides to cut off the water supply. Even after that, I sit there in the corner, finding bits of the soap and scrubbing at my fingernails. I imagine I can still see some of Brutus's blood there, though it's probably my own at this point. The aides in the hospital scrubbed me before they even let me come here. I don't know how long that was after they pulled me out of the arena.  
  
It was late at night when we landed on the roof of the Training Center. After that, there was time in the victors' hospital. I had a few minor wounds. I was cleaned. I think there was a Peacekeeper shouting questions at me, but I couldn't think. There was a fire. I already knew it, though I'd only seen it once at that point. I wanted my father. I remember asking for my father and the Peacekeeper said something awful, and I struck out at him, then there was pain in my head and things went blank for a while.  
  
I think it was sunset again when they pulled me through the door of our apartment, because I got a glimpse out the window toward the lake, and it seemed to be on fire, and I thought again of District Twelve, of my family, of everything I ever knew. Vanished.  
  
Has it been a day? It's possible that it's been a day. I've taken four showers, giving the hot water time to come back in between, and the sky outside the windows is dark, though the apartment is lit by firelight and flickering videos of blood and horror. I think about Brutus's blood on my skin, and I grasp at the taps, trying to force them to start running again, so I can scrub my hands a little more.  
  
I know it's crazy. It's okay that it's crazy. I murdered someone. I think that pretty much means I'm crazy anyway.  
  
And it's better than looking at the small, waterproof screen that's set at the top of the shower. In the past, this has projected information about the various bath products available to me. Now, it's showing firebombs falling on District Twelve. It's on a constant loop. It doesn't respond to any commands. I have seen my brother Ed and my father set on fire a dozen times. I've seen my brother Jonadab and my sister-in-law running madly from the square, Sarey carrying my niece in her arms. A building falls and they are engulfed. My mother is frozen on the steps of the bakery when a second bomb lands in front of it. She doesn't have time to burn. She is just _gone_ when the flames clear. There is a charred thing on the ground which I have so far been able to not look at directly.  
  
I try not to see it all in my head. The images in my head are much clearer than the videos. It all happened while I was on a transport, breathing through a mask. I was confused. I remembered calling to Katniss and hearing her call my name, and I remembered the sky above me turning to fire. I felt the electricity of the lightning storm, but I wasn't hit. My arm was out of joint from the Peacekeeper grabbing it and dragging me up into the transport, but I was counting myself lucky. Johanna Mason was shackled to the wall, and someone had knocked her unconscious. Her arm was bleeding, and no one had bandaged it. I tried to, but they pushed me back roughly and pointed a gun at me. Johanna managed to come to for a minute at the noise. She shook her head at me, then passed out again.  
  
Then the broadcast came on, and I saw it all for the first time. The bombs falling. Snow saying it was retaliation for Haymitch and Katniss's treason. I didn't see everything in that first viewing. It wasn't the one that was tailor-made for me, clipped together carefully from bits of Games production footage (before their production center was incinerated, of course). They must have had cameras on my family, trying to get interviews about the confusing, fiery end of the Quell. There's also security footage from the hovercraft. I can't remember that first reel now, not without all of the grotesqueries they added for my benefit.  
  
I sit on the floor of the shower until my skin and hair are dry, then pull myself out. Every part of me hurts. My arms are stiff from the fight with Brutus, my shoulder on fire from the repaired dislocation. My throat is sore from all the screaming. My head throbs. My natural leg is scratched; I don't even know when I did that. My artificial leg is sending weird little signals up the thigh it's attached to, like it's being bitten by rodents too tiny to see. Over the last year, I've gotten at least a little bit used to the way my brain tries to interpret the foreign signals the leg sends up my nerves, but this one is new. I don't know what the leg thinks happened to it.  
  
I wonder if they are going to take it away. It's arguably Capitol property. I hate it, but I don't know how I'm supposed to go around without it. I doubt they'd give me a peg to replace it. A crutch, maybe. I could learn to balance on a crutch. It's my stupid hand side, so maybe I'd even be able to stand at an easel and paint, though I'm not sure how I'd hold a palette.  
  
For a long time, I don't bother getting dressed. I lurch to my bed and lie down. On the screen, Jonadab looks back and forth between Dad and Sarey, and Dad yells, "Go!" I can't hear him, because by this point, the power in Twelve is off and the feed is coming from the bombers, but I know what he's saying. It's what I would say, though it doesn't do Jonadab any good when he finally goes with Sarey.  
  
Every now and then, there is a flicker in the picture, and a frame or two of Katniss aiming her arrow at the forcefield. I'm probably not supposed to be actually registering this. Delly Cartwright and I read a story once in literature class about someone who started to believe crazy things because of images he didn't even realize he was seeing. It made sense to Delly, but I didn't understand it. "That's because you see everything," Dad told me that night. "You always did. I don't know if that's something to be thankful for."  
  
I don't know what he meant by that. I feel like there are a lot of things I don't see, and a lot of things I see wrong. I was sure that when Katniss saw the picture of Gale that she'd understand that she didn't owe me anything, that she could go on living. That I _wanted_ her to. Instead, she was suddenly in my arms, and I felt like I was her whole world, something I never thought I'd feel. I don't know what I see there anymore. I thought I saw her loving me last year, but it turned out to be nothing but a ruse. I don't know if it's different now.  
  
It feels different.  
  
But that was before I was a murderer. There's that to remember. If she loves me, she loves the me who she was so sure wasn't a killer. I didn't see that in myself either. I paid lip service to the idea that I'd kill if it came down to it -- aren't we all just men of the world? -- but I envisioned it as a last ditch attempt to save my life or hers, or a time when I had no choice, like with Kersey Green from Eight last year, when she was dying in agony and I helped her escape it. I didn't see myself just grabbing Brutus from behind and slitting his throat.  
  
I didn't see that at all.  
  
But I guess Dad's right -- he _was_ right -- about seeing little physical things like this. I always used to finish first when the teacher handed out games where we were supposed to spot the differences between two pictures. Sometimes I found ones that weren't on her list. Katniss was amazed at how accurate the paintings I did of the arena were. I was frustrated that I only got about half of what I remember.  
  
So I see the little glimpses of Katniss raising her bow in the middle of my family's deaths. I register them as consciously as I register anything else I see. The message is clear enough: Katniss Everdeen killed your family. I'm not supposed to realize that it's hidden there.  
  
It's a wasted message.  
  
I know why they burned District Twelve and killed my family. It's because there's a rebellion. There's a rebellion because Katniss held up a handful of poison berries.  
  
Which she did because she decided to save my life.  
  
If I'd died like I was supposed to, no rebellion. My family would be alive and as crazy as usual. Katniss most likely would have won the Games anyway, once they sent her the burn ointment and she got the bow from Glimmer. After that, I didn't do her any good. Cato should have killed me, and then she'd have been free to win the Games in whichever way made sense to her.  
  
No rebellion.  
  
No burning of District Twelve.  
  
But here I am. Even now, still alive. I have no idea why.  
  
I pull on a pair of shorts. It's all I have the energy for, but I know I'm on camera somewhere, and I've had enough of people looking at me. I go out to the living room and pour a cup of tea, which I set down and forget about.  
  
The tape loop starts again, and I see my brother Ed in the stocks.  He is watching the area where I know the big screen is set up. He looks disgusted. So does my father, who is standing beside him. In a few minutes, Katniss will blow out the forcefield, which means that they must have just watched me murder Brutus. In the distance, tinny and mad, I hear myself screaming.  
  
In another shot, my mother covers her eyes. My sister-in-law looks terrified, and holds the baby close to her. The Games microphones are still on them, and Jonadab whispers, _Come out of it, Peeta, you had to do it._  
  
Back at the stocks, Ed is shaking his head in negation. I hear my father sigh, _Oh, Peeta._  
  
His voice is full of pain and disappointment and love. He always called me his "good son." He loved all of us, and was proud of us for different reasons. He was proud of me for being good.  
  
And I've just murdered a man in front of him. It is the last thing he will ever see me do.  
  
Brutus hadn't even turned on me yet. He would have, and he probably would have killed me if he had, but I didn't even try to get away. All I could think was that he was slowing me down, that I had to get back to the rendezvous point and find Katniss.  And that he'd said I was nothing and I could never have won the Games on my own, which didn't hurt any less than it did when my mother said it.  And that he'd killed Chaff, of course. Chaff, who was Haymitch's friend, who'd just spoken to me in my mentor's voice, ordering me to leave. Who'd taken on Brutus to give me time.  
  
My knife was in my hand.  
  
I should have thrown it away. I should have thrown it into the jungle and started running. If he'd caught me, maybe it would have been a fair fight, at least.  
  
On screens all around me, the power goes out in District Twelve. In a few minutes, the screaming will begin.  I only hear it faintly from the hovercrafts' sound systems, but it's been amplified for my benefit.  
  
I want them to take it back a minute or so. I want to hear my father say my name again. I'm sure I will, as soon as the whole thing has played through. He will say _Oh, Peeta_ , and then he will die screaming. I'll never hear his voice again. There will be no more stories of his grandfather's grandfathers, told over a flour-strewn kneading table. I'll never find out why he and Mom... _were_. My gentle, romantic father and my cold mother, with her occasional nuclear flare-ups. I never understood them together, how the interplay between them created my brothers and me in a million different ways, and now I never will.  
  
There is a chime, and the elevator door opens. I don't look up. It's not like I can control who comes and goes.  
  
"May I come in?" a familiar voice asks.  
  
I stand up and turn. "Caesar?"  
  
Caesar Flickerman smiles sadly, an expression so unlike his usual toothy grin that for a moment, I doubt my recognition of him. His hair is still lilac-colored, but it's mostly hidden under his hat. He's wearing no makeup. He's carrying a large picnic basket.  
  
"How are you holding up?" he asks.  
  
"My family's dead," I tell him, as the bombs start to drop again on the television screens.  
  
"I know. I'm sorry."  
  
"We never got along very well. It was better after the Games, but..." I take a deep breath. "My niece was only a few months old."  
  
"You never mentioned her."  
  
"She was ours. She didn't belong to the Games."  
  
Caesar nods miserably. "May I sit down?"  
  
"You're not a guest. I'm not a host. Do they want you to get me to tell you something?"  
  
"Yeah." He takes a seat in a large wing chair by the window. I sit across from him. We might be on his stage, getting ready for a big interview. "They want to know what you knew, and when you knew it."  
  
"I know what they know, and I knew it when they knew it," I say. This isn't totally true. I knew about the rebellion. I knew about the uprising in Eight. I guessed as far back as the Victory Tour that Haymitch was hiding something, but I trusted him to tell me when I needed to know. I didn't know anything specific. I had no idea they were going to blow the arena. If I'd known, I'd have kept Katniss still and stayed with her. I'd be wherever she is now.  
  
I guess I know that Haymitch was in the middle of everything. Unless I was hallucinating -- which I'm not ruling out -- he was in the arena at the end, firing at the hovercraft that was taking me, trying to get me free. Whatever was going on, he was in the thick of it. I haven't mentioned that, but, since the cameras were running, I’m willing to bet that they already know it.  
  
"You know they're not going to believe that," Caesar says.  
  
"They can believe what they want. You want me to tell them that time travelers from the past came and picked up Katniss so she can assassinate Snow in the cradle? Fine. I'll do that. I'll make them believe it, too."  
  
"If anyone could, you could. I wouldn't recommend trying."  
  
"Why didn't they just kill me?"  
  
Caesar is quiet for a very long time, then he says, "Peeta, do you know who took Katniss?"  
  
"I told you, I don't know anything about it!"  
  
"No, I was asking personally." He takes off his hat and sets it down, and digs his fingers into his hair. When he looks up, he says, "We know who took her already. That's not a mystery."  
  
I look up. "What? Who? What do they want from me, if they know?"  
  
"She's in District Thirteen."  
  
I can't think of a thing to say except, "What?"  
  
He nods. "They were supposed to keep to themselves, but sources say that they're re-arming. They mean to start the wars again. And we suspect -- all of us suspect -- that they mean to rally around Katniss."  
  
"If so, she doesn't know anything about it."  
  
Caesar doesn't say anything. He's waiting for me to put pieces together.  
  
Thirteen exists, just like Katniss suspected and Haymitch denied. They're arming for a war. They want Katniss to speak for them.  
  
The Capitol hasn't killed me.  
  
"They want me to rally against her," I realize. "They're still trying to pit us against each other. Finally get it down to a single victor."  
  
"More or less."  
  
"Forget it. I have no idea what they're doing, but whatever they're doing, I'm on their side."  
  
"Their side is going to end up with a lot of people dead."  
  
"Well, that fits. I'm a murderer now."  
  
"Brutus?" Caesar asks, surprised. "He'd have killed you without thinking twice."  
  
"Which is exactly how I killed him."  
  
Caesar wraps his hands around my upper arms. I expect him to start shaking me. Instead, he just waits until I look at him, then says, "Stop that. Just stop it. You're a human being. You were in an inhuman situation. The Games exist to break people as much as kill them."  
  
"Well, it worked."  
  
"No. You wouldn't be obsessing over it if it had worked. Do you think Brutus ever gave a second thought to anyone he killed?"  
  
"Probably not," I admit.  
  
"Definitely not. I spent a lot of time with him over the years. He laughed about people he killed in the arena. He was doing it again in the Quell arena."  
  
"That doesn't make it all right."  
  
"No. But the fact that you know that does mean that you're still Peeta Mellark. And you are going to need to hold onto that, tighter than you've ever held on to anything. Don't let go." I have no idea what to say to this, so I just wait until he lets go of my arms and sits back. He leans forward like he's about to start interviewing me again. "Do you understand what I'm saying, Peeta?"  
  
I shake my head.  
  
"Whatever happens, you need to find a way to hold on to who you are."  
  
There is something in the intensity of his stare, the fear in his voice, that terrifies me. "You think they're going to torture me," I guess.  
  
He points at the screens around the room, which are showing District Twelve crumbling to ash. The whole thing will begin again in a minute, and my father will say, _Oh, Peeta_. "They already started. And the Capitol has a lot of ways to hurt you before they resort to anything as crude as physical torture. They will get to it eventually, though. I'll do whatever I can to keep that from happening. But..."  
  
"So I'm supposed to play along?" I stand up and go to the window. "Is that why you're really here, to tell me that if I don't go along with the scheme to rally against Katniss, they'll torture me?"  
  
"No." He stands up and goes across the living room. He stops by the elevator door. "I'm sorry you would think that about me, Peeta."  
  
I see his reflection in the window glass. He looks sad and hunched, his hat in his hands. I want to apologize, but I don't. It would open doors that need to stay closed.  
  
He sighs and points at the wicker picnic basket and says, "I brought you something to pass the time. Something to look at other than..." He trails off. "Something to focus on."  
  
The elevator chimes and he gets in, leaving me alone again just as my father says my name.  
  
I stay by the window for a long time. It's one-way glass, and people on the street can't see me (unless there's a live feed from a camera, of course). I lean my forehead against it, press my hands onto the cool glass to let out the heat in my body. The lights go off, and the light from the screens is my only illumination (it is quite sufficient to see). The pictures reflect in the glass, turning to blurry gray when they pass over my hands then resolving again on the other side.  
  
I wonder what they'll do to me. Ripping out my artificial leg seems like a good start. Just unplug the wires from my nerves, one by one. Maybe they'd burn me, wreck my hands so I can't paint. Or my eyes, so I can't see anymore.  
  
Maybe they'd grab me by my hair, pull my head back, and slit my throat, like I did to Brutus. That wouldn't get them any information, but if they did it on television, they'd find a way to show it to Katniss in Thirteen, the same way they're showing me my family's deaths here. They'd kill me, and convince her that it's her fault. Snow already convinced her that the uprisings were her fault.  
  
I decide not to die near a camera, if I can help it.  
  
I think about going to my room to try and sleep, but I switch directions and go to Katniss's instead. I half expect the door to be locked, but it isn't. There's no reason for it to be. All of her screens are broadcasting the same video as the ones in the living room and my room and my shower. And she's not here.  
  
I crawl into her bed and ball up a pillow behind my neck. The other pillow, I hold under one arm, like I hold her when we sleep. It doesn't help much. It doesn't even smell like her perfume or any other maudlin thing. It's just a pillow.  
  
But she slept on it, and that makes it precious. I hold it tightly and watch the bakery collapse into rubble. As the false front gives way, for an instant I can see into my house, into my old bedroom. Everything in it is etched in flame. Then the floor falls out and I recognize nothing.  
  
Utter weariness finally takes me at some unnamable time of night. I only know I'm dreaming because I'm inside the fire instead of watching it on a screen. I am with my father as he dies. My mother is holding my arm hard enough to leave bruises when she is suddenly turned to ash. My niece is crying, but I can't find her. My brothers burn like torches in the night. I look up at the giant screen in the square, the one for public viewing, which burned like everything else, but in my dream, I see myself on it, killing Brutus. I see Katniss calling for me, then I see her raise her bow toward the sky. She shoots toward a star, and then the whole world is in flames.  
  
I open my eyes in the darkness, where the flickering broadcast is still going on. It's still night. I don't know if I've slept very long at all.  
  
I go back to the living room, holding Katniss's pillow, and sit down at the table. Caesar's picnic basket Is still there, unopened. I don't know what he thinks will help me, and my confusion on that point is not assuaged at all when I open the basket and find about a hundred decks of playing cards. The backs are decorated with a motif from Caesar's show. On top of the pile is a handwritten list of instructions on how to build card houses.  
  
I blink at this strange gift for a long time, wondering what Caesar means by it. There may be a way to use them as weapons, but if there is, I don't know it. I'm sure the basket wouldn't have been allowed up here if it was something easy to learn. I have never expressed any interest in cards to Caesar, or to anyone else that I’m aware of. I've played a few poker games with my brothers, but the main interest there was the bluff. We got bored with the card game part of it after a few tries, and just switched to jabberjay drills, which all of us were better at.  
  
In a jabberjay drill, a game developed during the Dark Days as a way to lie to the spying birds which developed into a childhood pastime for a lot of us, you start with some simple truth -- "I was in English class today, and we were reading a book about the plague" -- then begin to embellish it. At first, it's some little lie, maybe "Izzarel Tarpley decided to sing a song about it." Then you start layering on deeper and deeper lies until it's gotten so absurd that everyone is laughing. Maybe the teacher gets a call from a Capitol agent, and someone is sent off to explore the moon. The last one to laugh wins.  
  
It's simpler than poker, and much more fun.  
  
I frown at the cards, and take out Caesar's list of instructions. I'm sure he gave it to me for some reason. I believe that Caesar is on my side, one way or another, though his interpretation of what my side is may be different from mine.  
  
 _Step one, take two cards, and lean them against each other in an inverted "V" shape. Concentrate._  
  
I pick up two cards and try this. The list is very long, and I'm sure the first step must be simple.  
  
I can't get the cards to stay up. They want to slide against each other, push each other back down onto the table. I look at the underlined word. Concentrate.  
  
It takes quite a while before I can get one inverted V right, and even longer for me to set a second one up beside it without knocking the first one down. Step two, getting a card laid across the peaks, is even harder.  
  
I finally succeed in making one little structure. I stare at it and wonder what kind of message it's supposed to have. Caesar's face smiles at me from the backs of the cards. I look at it from a different angle and still see nothing. I peer into the little shapes, which look like abstract eyes, but if Caesar is trying to pass me a code, I'm missing it entirely.  
  
I look up, frustrated. The early morning sunlight is coming through the window. The video of the burning of District Twelve is still playing, but I haven't paid attention to it since I started building.  
  
I look at Caesar's instructions again. Over and over, he has underlined words. _Concentrate_. _Focus._ _Balance._  
  
The bombs start falling.  
  
I turn deliberately away from the screens and deal myself two more cards from the first deck. Carefully balance them. Concentrate. Set them beside the first pair. Put another card on top.  
  
Start the next level.  
  
My tower collapses before I finish the second level, but I pick the cards up calmly and start again. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peeta finds out what Snow wants him to do, and gets word about his companions.

**Chapter 2**   
I don't know how long I've been building card houses when Caesar arrives with breakfast. I know it's been a few hours, at least. I've managed to go up to a third level, but I always seem to knock it down.  
  
"I see you've been busy," Caesar says.  
  
I nod. "Thanks. It's... it's helpful."  
  
"I know." He smiles and takes some of the scrambled eggs from a large dish, then offers me the rest. "I've been doing them for years. Sometimes, you just need to think about something else."  
  
"Yeah." I take some food and sigh. "My family is still dead, though. And Katniss is gone. Have they heard anything? Do they know if she's okay? Or are you not supposed to tell me?"  
  
"I don't have access to everything, but I've been authorized to tell you that she was injured in the escape. She's in medical care."  
  
"But she'll be okay?"  
  
"Our sources there seem to think so." He frowns, waiting for something, then says, "I'm afraid a shock like that... she might have lost the baby."  
  
This cuts through the little cocoon I've been building around myself since I found the cards. I almost forgot about that story I told. It seems so stupid now. Such a ridiculous chance to take. I figured she'd claim a miscarriage after I was dead and go on. But now... now, if they find out, then people will hate her.  
  
"I imagine it didn't even seem real yet," Caesar prods.  
  
I've seen him use this technique with Katniss. He used it in our interview last year when she was supposed to tell him when she fell in love with me. I thought it was because she was nervous at the time. Now, I understand. Caesar does this to help confused tributes keep their stories straight when he knows they've told a lie. I nod. "Yeah. It was all very new. If you find out, can you let me know?"  
  
"Oh, you'll be the first to know," another voice says. I look up. President Snow is standing near the elevator, smiling unpleasantly. He comes in and sits down for breakfast without any invitation. "Believe me, the story will be that she miscarried, no matter what intelligence we get. The last thing I want is for people to start thinking you're a liar. Unless, of course, we say that she lied to you. That she was never pregnant, but just let you believe it so you'd give up your life in the arena."  
  
"No," I say. "Don't do that."  
  
Snow pauses. "And why shouldn't I?"  
  
I think quickly. I want him to keep from smearing Katniss's name because I don't want her name smeared, not to mention because I don't want it to be politically possible for him to execute her if the rebellion fails, but he won't care about that. I have to convince him that it's in his own interest. "If you try that right away," I tell him, "they won't believe you. Definitely not in the districts, and probably not even in the Capitol. They'll think you're playing politics and trying to get revenge on her for breaking your arena."  
  
" _Will_ they."  
  
"He's right, Coriolanus," Caesar says. "Peeta knows how to spin a narrative better than anyone in your government. Including Plutarch, I should point out, since it's Plutarch we're working against."  
  
"Plutarch?" I ask. "Plutarch Heavensbee? The head Gamemaker?"  
  
Snow gives a dismissive snort. "I see you really weren't involved. Yes, Plutarch Heavensbee. It seems he arranged the whole business with your mentor and a handful of the other tributes. Obviously, I am not sharing that with the public. I had not intended to share it with you." He narrows his eyes at Caesar. "Nevertheless, Caesar is quite right that you have a certain instinct for playing an audience. I assume he discussed your upcoming appearances with you?"  
  
"He mentioned what you _want_ from me."  
  
Snow looks up from a pastry he is buttering. "You are mistaking your position, Mr. Mellark."  
  
"You think I don't know that you can torture me and put me in a cell and eventually kill me if I don't go along? Maybe I don't care all that much.  I was planning on dying anyway, remember?"  
  
"Do I need to remind you that you are not the only person I have access to?" He presses a button on the table, the sort of thing that usually orders food, and the elevator door opens again. Two Peacekeepers come in with our Avoxes -- the pretty girl who Katniss saw trying to escape, and Darius, from home. One of the Peacekeepers strikes the girl. Darius makes a move to stop him (he is a trained Peacekeeper himself), and gets a gun butt in the face for his troubles.  
  
"Darius and Lavinia here are just two of a long list of people who are depending on you to do well," Snow says. "If they aren't important enough to you, I also have your prep team, your stylist, your escort, Annie Cresta, and Johanna Mason to go through before I get to killing you. Are you quite clear about this?"  
  
I look at Darius, who is moaning on the floor, and at the never ending video loop of the destruction of District Twelve. If Snow will destroy an entire district to punish Katniss, I can't imagine that he'd scruple at killing nine people just to control me. I nod.  
  
Snow gestures to the Peacekeepers. "Very well, then. Take them back downstairs." He waits until they are gone, then says, "If you believe that it would be disadvantageous to denounce Miss Everdeen -- and let's not pretend she's Mrs. Mellark here -- then what would you do? Keeping in mind, of course, that the goal is to stop the war she intends to start."  
  
"She doesn't intend to start a war."  
  
"Someone does."  
  
"Someone _around_ her," I say, then sigh, thinking again of the game my brothers and I played. "It's a jabberjay drill."  
  
"A what?"  
  
"You have to start with the truth that everyone knows. That I love her. And I'm not going to start accusing her of anything like that. That's true."  
  
"And then?"  
  
My head hurts. I want my brain to go blank, but it doesn't. It comes up with a story as easily as it ever did. "Then we talk about how she's been _captured_. How we were lied to."  
  
"By Haymitch Abernathy?" Snow suggests.  
  
"More likely Plutarch," Caesar says. "Haymitch is likely as much a pawn as the girl."  
  
"Abernathy has been involved in the inner circles of the rebellion for years," Snow says. "I somehow doubt he was taken by surprise. I know he met with Heavensbee in District Twelve shortly after the Quell was announced."  
  
"Is Haymitch in Thirteen, too?" I ask.  
  
"Yes. Or rather, he's expected, with the others, this afternoon. My sources report that the rescue craft is taking something of a roundabout route. He and several others murdered their way out of the Viewing Center. He lost his companions on the way, I'm afraid, but he was last seen flying away in the arena. Leaving you behind."  
  
I wonder if Snow knows that Haymitch was in the arena, that I saw him there, shooting at the ship. That I know he didn't leave me. I can't imagine what difference it makes to keep that secret, but I hold onto it, just in case. I didn't call back to him. It's feasible that I wouldn't know.  
  
And since it's clear that Snow knows enough to accuse Haymitch of high treason, it's pointless to pretend I think he's innocent. I don't think I can save him and Katniss at the same time with a victim ruse, and we agreed to keep her safe. "Fine," I say. "Haymitch used us." This is true enough, and he should have realized the plan wasn't exactly failsafe. I assume the plan was to get both of us out, but it just failed. That won't help with Snow, though. Haymitch will have to handle the fallout if it hits him; he's been doing it longer than Katniss has, and he knows what he's doing. "Haymitch betrayed us to the Rebellion," I say, not bothering with any sense of conviction, "and now they have Katniss, and I don't know if she's even safe with them. She doesn't know who they are."  
  
"That's very good," Snow says. "And when she starts speaking, it will seem natural to wonder who's directing her."  
  
"That's another thing," I say. "In the districts, they'll know you're directing me."  
  
"Unless you let him tell the truth about the Games," Caesar says abruptly. He stands up and starts pacing. "That's it. That's the only way. If they can see he's telling one truth you won't like, then they may be more inclined to believe him."  
  
"And what truth is that, Caesar?"  
  
"The truth that no one who hasn't been in an arena knows," Caesar says. "The truth about what it does to you. Can you talk about that, Peeta?"  
  
"Absolutely not," Snow says. "That is off the table."  
  
"Caesar's right," I say. "If I say something that doesn't look like you wrote it, then maybe they'll believe the rest."  
  
Snow turns and glares at Caesar. "I know what you're doing," he says. "You've been skirting this line for decades. Be careful where you step. Peeta's aren't the only people I can reach."  
  
"I'm well aware of that, Coriolanus."  
  
They stare at each other for a long time, and I try to understand the rules between them. It feels important that I do. Caesar hates Snow. That much is clear. Snow seems... annoyed? Frustrated? I can't get a read on him. He doesn't seem to take Caesar's hatred seriously, though.  
  
Snow looks away, his nostrils flaring with disdain, and says, "This is what you will accomplish in your interview. First, you will establish that Katniss Everdeen has been abducted by a hostile force. Then, you will call for a ceasefire."  
  
"A ceasefire? Who's firing?"  
  
Snow hits another button on the table. The burning of District Twelve disappears, and on a single large screen, he shows footage of District Four. I recognize the beach near the Victor's Village. It's strewn with bodies. Heavy fire is coming from ships in the harbor, and Peacekeepers are being mown down. The video switches to District Eleven -- I assume, anyway, since we seem to be in a vast field -- where people with hoes and pitchforks are overrunning soldiers with guns. There are piles of corpses on both sides.  
  
"Need I go on?" Snow asks.  
  
I shake my head. "How many districts?"  
  
"Four in active rebellion. At the moment, we've subdued Three and Eight.  And Twelve, of course."  
  
"Twelve was never rebelling."  
  
He leaves the video from Eleven running. A pick-up truck loaded with household supplies is attacked, its tires burst with pitchforks. The fleeing family inside of it is dragged out and beaten. Then the Peacekeepers open fire on all of them.  
  
"War is a terrible thing," Snow says.  
  
"And if they put their arms down, you'll roll over them completely."  
  
"There's a price for rebellion. It's less than the price of war."  
  
"If you make the price too high, they'll just do it again," I try.  
  
Snow frowns. "Do you know what human beings are, Mr. Mellark?" I don't answer, and he doesn't wait for it. He pushes another button, and this time, I see myself grabbing Brutus, slitting his throat. Over and over. "Human beings are murderers. Killers of our own kind. We always have been. We always will be. It's never very deep down, even in people who think they're far above it, wouldn't you say?"  
  
On screen, I start screaming. I look down.  
  
"We've already nearly wiped ourselves out several times over. Human beings need to be controlled if we mean to survive. And those that can't be controlled need to be put down. I assure you, even our friends in Thirteen know that." With that, he stands up. "Caesar, make sure he's prepared. And stay away from specific dates. I don't know when we'll be airing this. Certainly not until Miss Everdeen is more properly aware of her surroundings."  
  
He leaves.  
  
Caesar sighs, and turns on a noisy coffee maker. I doubt this will hide a lot, but maybe we can cover a little bit. "Are you ready for this, Peeta?"  
  
"Guess I have to be. Can you do anything about... the other people?"  
  
"I talked him out of killing Johanna before I came over here last night. I'm not sure she'll thank me for it."  
  
"And my preps? Portia? Effie?"  
  
"I've requested your regular preps to be assigned to you for the future, but today, there'll be a different crew. I have people looking after Effie. She's in jail, but she's safe at the moment. I’m making a fuss about interviewing her. I'll put that off as long as I can, but with it pending, they won't hurt her. Portia is being questioned about Cinna."  
  
"Where's Cinna? Is he with the others in Thirteen?"  
  
Caesar shakes his head. "Katniss didn't tell you in the arena? They beat him. Just before she was sent up. He died in questioning on the way back to the Capitol."  
  
I cover my eyes. "She couldn't very well have told me, could she? Not with the cameras running. They hurt him in front of her?"  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"Why do you work for these people?"  
  
"I just fell into it. It's hard to fall out." He turns off the coffee maker. "I know the last thing you want to do is go through prep right now. But you look like hell."  
  
"How are we doing the interview? Are they giving me a script, like on the Victory Tour?"  
  
"No. You come up with better scripts in your head than Snow's people come up with after a year's work."  
  
"Generally, I'm aiming at something I actually want to hit."  
  
Caesar looks at his shoes for a long time, then says, "Peeta, Snow is a bastard. I know it as well as you do. He knows it himself. But he's _not wrong_ , not about how much a war will cost. Before the Dark Days, we managed to get our population back up to about five million. After the war, we were back to fewer than two million. And that's not even getting into the Catastrophes. Do you know there were once almost twelve _billion_ human beings on Earth? They worried about overpopulation."  
  
I've heard the number before, but it's inconceivable to me. Cities the size of the Capitol, or even bigger, all over the planet. "Where are we now?"  
  
"Last census? Around four million in Panem. We rebounded quickly. Humans are nothing if not prolific. More than a third of us are in the Capitol. I don't know how many they have in Thirteen."  
  
I imagine Thirteen and guess it to be about the size of the Capitol. Maybe add a million and a half to the four million.  
  
And subtract about eighty-five hundred from District Twelve, and however many I saw die in the uprisings, and the ones who died in the arena, and whoever died when Haymitch and the others escaped the Viewing Center.  
  
It wouldn't take all that long to burn through five and a half million people.  
  
"Snow could stop this better than I could," I say. "Give amnesty to all the rebels. Give rights to the districts. Stop the Games. Let people get the food they need. Work at what they want to work at."  
  
"That might have worked once," Caesar tells me. "Before the Games started. After the Dark Days, if the Capitol hadn't cracked down. But tell me, Peeta -- do you really think it will work now? Do you really think that after seventy five years, people will just give up on revenge if we give them the vote? Reinstate the District Congress?"  
  
"I don't know. Maybe."  
  
"It won't." Caesar sighs. "I wish it would. But revenge gets worse the longer people wait for it. Whenever you keep something under pressure, it explodes when the lid comes off."  
  
I want to disagree. I want to believe that if we just fix the problems, everything will be fine.  
  
I don't actually believe it. During the Dark Days, my great-great-grandfather's bakery was smashed to bits in the riots... and he _was_ actually a rebel. The Irish merchants were seen as colluders. So businesses were broken down, and three people died at the hands of rebels during the riots. Four more died at the hands of the Peacekeepers afterward. Dad said it took almost fifty years for us to get back to even the strained relationship we did manage, and that was fragile and prone to occasionally violent feuding.  
  
I nod.  
  
Caesar stands up. "You better get dressed. Your preps will be up in about half an hour."  
  
"Then shouldn't I get _undressed_?"  
  
"You really don't have far to go." Caesar gives my shoulder an affectionate squeeze, then leaves.  
  
I clear away breakfast and go back to building card houses. I have no idea how much of the world is a card house, how much will break if we pull one support out. I don't believe that people need to live under Snow's boot (or anyone else's), but, in case I forget that I'm not the best judge of character, the video of my killing of Brutus is playing over and over now. I almost wish they'd go back to Twelve. I don't need to see this. I still have a cramp in my hand from holding the knife hard enough to cut his throat. It's more difficult than it looks. People tend to resist dying much harder than they resist killing.  
  
I try to think. I don't want to get people angry at the rebels. That's one thing. I'm sure Snow wants it, but I don't. I also try to figure out why Caesar is so adamant that I talk about the arena. I know he was trying to undermine the Games during the Quell, but what's the point now? There are no Games happening. The Quell was broken. I believe that Caesar is on my side, but what is he trying to give me?  
  
"Peeta!"  
  
I look up. The video has changed again. It's showing Katniss now, crawling toward Beetee. Her head and her arm are bleeding. I can hear myself calling her in the distance, and she looks wild-eyed and scared. She's trying to draw the attention from me. Trying to call the other tributes in her direction. Finnick and Enobaria come into frame, fighting, and she raises her arrow at Enobaria. Then she abruptly lowers it, wraps the arrow in wire, and takes aim at the sky, in the shot I've seen a hundred times now. She blows out the forcefield and is thrown aside by the lightning. Finnick is also thrown, but he seems much more mobile after it. He didn't take a direct hit.  
  
Katniss looks dead. Caesar and Snow both say she isn't. They could both be lying, but I can't see a good reason for it. They have plenty of other people to hold over my head, and Snow certainly seems concerned about how she might rally the rebels.  
  
I stare at her, being lifted out of the arena, shocked and broken.  
  
And I understand what Caesar has given me.  
  
It's not just a chance to make her seem innocent. It's a chance to make her sympathetic again. The audience will have been seeing this all day. They'll want to know what she was doing, and why she did it. I can give them an answer that will make them love her again, or at least pity her.  
  
She'll hate it.  
  
But she'll be alive to do it.  
  
The new prep team comes up at noon. There is a timid woman with her hair in the new "natural" style, this one more like Prim's than Katniss's, and a young man who has a suspiciously familiar spill of bleached blond curls.  
  
I don't know what my face must be registering. I've seen girls done up like Katniss, but never anyone done up like _me_. Whatever my face says, the man grins shamefacedly and says, "Well, at least you know I can get it right. I'm Aurelian. I'm new. District One." He flashes a badge at me. It's too fast to see for sure, but I don't think his face matches the picture on the badge. He could be a rebel, or he could be a Games fan. I have no way of knowing.  
  
The woman turns out not to be new. Her name is Phillida and she's a stylist who's worked for District Two. She takes a quick inventory of the injuries on my skin and proceeds to put me through a thorough disinfecting. Ointment goes onto the scratches on my legs, and she starts moisturizing my skin, tutting about the awful drying out from the chemical burns I took. Aurelian helps her with this part, though, unlike most stylists I've ever seen, he seems a little embarrassed about some of it. He bandages a cut on my back that I didn't even know was there, and tells me that I got it when they pulled me into the hovercraft. "I was watching," he explains. "I saw it happen."  
  
"We were all watching," Phillida says, but doesn't elaborate. I realize she might have been one of Brutus's preps.  
  
"I'll get his hair started," Aurelian says. "If you want to start the moisture bath."  
  
Phillida sniffs and heads off to the bathroom.  
  
I go into the kitchen with Aurelian, and he hooks up a hair sink to the plumbing. I get a closer view of his badge, which shows a blue-haired young man, apparently by the name of Damien Lowe. I raise an eyebrow. He shrugs.  
  
When the water turns on, he starts scrubbing, then drops a small bottle of something into the sink. He leans over and, when he's right beside my ear, says, "Effie Trinket wants to know if you're all right. I have a friend working at the jail keeping an eye on her."  
  
"She okay?" I whisper, trying not to move my mouth.  
  
"Yeah. They took her wig and she's in a prison uniform, but she's okay."  
  
"Portia?"  
  
"In jail, too. But okay." He stands up and starts washing my hair.  
  
I have to wait until the dryer comes out before I manage to say, "Tell Effie I'm all right so far. And to watch her back."  
  
"Mm-hmm."  
  
"Who are you?"  
  
"Let's say, just a fan. There are a lot of us out there in the Capitol. We're trying to help."  
  
"People… aren't they angry?"  
  
"People are confused. I'm doing my best to get them to… remember. My friends are working on it, too."  
  
I imagine them -- teenagers here in the Capitol, risking the bugs and the Peacekeepers. Why? To help the rebellion? To help the star-crossed lovers of District Twelve? To save a fictional baby? Whatever the reason, it's wildly dangerous, and Aurelian and his friends must have a yard of guts. The only thing I can think of to tell him is, "Keep safe."  
  
Aurelian nods and turns off the dryer. There's no further opportunity to find out more, since applying styling products to my hair doesn't make any noise. He may be new, but he obviously knows what he's doing, at least with my hair. Which makes sense, since he obviously does the same thing to his own every morning.  
  
After my hair is done, Phillida submerges my body in moisturizers while she works more of them into my face. The fact that I haven't slept much doesn't go unnoticed, and she spends what seems like an eternity covering up dark circles under my eyes. Finally Aurelian brings me a suit and helps me into it, as I'm a little stiff for moving around. It must have been recently altered, since it fits me after the arena.  
  
I put my hands in the pockets, hearing Portia berating me for it in my head, and am not entirely surprised to feel a piece of paper there. I don't take it out here, where I'm undoubtedly on camera. I wait until I am in a studio -- not Caesar's usual studio, but an underground one in City Center, which may even be at the Presidential Mansion -- and they're running the camera checks. I can see that I'm not on any of the screens. I pull the slip out as quietly as I can. It's brief and to the point, written in pencil.  
  
_Peeta, remember what Haymitch said: Stay alive. I will be trying to do the same. Love you, honey. Portia._  
  
I shove it back into my pocket. I'll have to eat it or something later; she'll get in trouble for sneaking me a message even than innocuous. I try to find a message in it, but, like Caesar's card houses, it seems to be just what it is -- something to try and help me. It doesn't. All I can think of now is Portia, in jail. Forced to stitch something up for me when she knows I'm going to be going on the air and betraying a cause that Cinna, at least, died for.  
  
It occurs to me briefly that Snow's people planted it, to _make_ me think about Portia. I can't think of any rational reason not to believe that. But I don't. I don't think she ever called me "honey" where cameras picked it up.  
  
Caesar comes around from the stage door, polished and prepped, and claps a hand on my shoulder. "Are you ready?" he asks.  
  
I nod.  
  
We go to his stage, and the charade begins.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the first interview, Peeta's imprisonment becomes a much deadlier game.

**Chapter 3**  
I do as I'm told, for the most part. I ask people to think before they start fighting a war. I establish that Katniss is under the control of a hostile force. I even embellish a little bit with what Caesar told me about the population crash during the Dark Days and the Catastrophes. This isn't exactly hard to sell -- I don't really disbelieve it, any more than I disbelieve that Katniss is in most senses a captive of the rebellion as much as I am of the Capitol.  
  
I want to tell Katniss that I now understand exactly what she was feeling about me for the last year. Even true things can feel disgustingly false when they're being forced out of you.  
  
Caesar gives me an in to talk about the Games. I say I don't remember what happened, which is a flat lie, but I can't talk about all of it. Not yet. He lets me talk about what the arena is really like for a little while. It's a small victory.  
  
The only place where I'm not entirely obedient is that I make a point of telling the Capitol soldiers that they also should think before they start reprisals. If pressed, I'll say that this is part of the grand plan to make it all look real instead of scripted.  
  
What I doubt Snow will notice, but I hope Haymitch and Katniss will, is that I try to _make_ parts of it sound scripted. _Well_ -scripted. But scripted. So they'll pick up that I'm not just turning on the districts.  
  
I stab Haymitch in the back partway through. I blame him for everything. I hope he knows I'm playing the game. I hope he understands that. If he doesn't, my father would never forgive me for hurting him this way. But I don't think about that. I can't.  
  
I almost forget to call for a cease-fire, but Caesar prods me for it. I do it, and ask to go back to my room to make more card houses. See how benign my imprisonment is?  
  
Caesar drives me personally, though we have an armed escort.  
  
"You did the right thing," Caesar says as we go slowly through the Capitol streets.  
  
"Then why do I feel like I just burned my district all over again?"  
  
Caesar doesn't answer. I look out the windows. Capitol citizens are wandering around in shock. I see some still in their natural hair styles. An old woman is sitting on a park bench with a fluffy dog, crying into the fur on its neck. A boy is staring up a blank giant screen, as if waiting for it to give him the meaning of life.  
  
"What's going on here?" I ask. "Were we on live?"  
  
"Just in the Capitol. Snow hasn't decided when to broadcast to the districts."  
  
"What's wrong with them?"  
  
"They're confused." He sighs as we turn the last corner toward the training center. "You have to understand what they saw. As far as they can see, they've given you and Katniss more love than they've ever given to any other tributes. They've supported you. They've named their children and their pets after you. They've read books, seen plays... the last year in the Capitol has been all about you. Some of them have even made changes in their lives and the things they believe because of you."  
  
"I wanted them to."  
  
"And you were wildly successful. I don't think even Haymitch really understood _how_ successful." He slows down and shows a badge to a guard at the parking garage. "People were touched. They wanted to _be_ Katniss. They wanted you to love and approve of them."  
  
" _What?_ "  
  
He pulls into the garage under the building, behind the first row of our guard, and he parks. "I wondered if you had any idea about that part. The young man who did your hair -- I let him in because he believed in you. I don't know where the real stylist was. Probably in a dramatic sulk." Before he releases the restraints on our seats, he says, "The point, Peeta, is that they feel like they've been slapped. Like they've offered their hands in friendship only to have their fingers bitten, at least by Katniss. They feel... well, rejected by someone they love."  
  
"They don't even know us."  
  
"No. But they know themselves. And they know that your story changed them. They don't want it all to turn out to be as poisonous as the berries that started it. They're not all Snow or the Gamemakers."  
  
There are a million logical arguments for this. That it shouldn't matter what Katniss and I actually do to judge whether or not the ideas they've attributed to us are good. That we could be horrible people and still tell them something true. That they ought to follow those ideas to their logical conclusion and realize that escaping from the arena was the natural endgame, and they should be using their power to take down Snow at any rate.  
  
But human beings aren't logical. I remember being bored and frustrated in an ancient history class once, until Dad told me that it was all about the stories. Ignore the text and the analysis. Think about what it felt like to be alive then. What was it like to watch a man put a flag on the moon? What did people talk about at the dinner table while the genetic engineering age was flourishing? Could I imagine watching the oceans slowly creeping up to swallow the greatest cities in the land, forcing their populations up to the hills further inland, where they were often met with violent resistance?  
  
We always associate what happens with the people who are part of it. And when those people turn out to have clay feet, as Katniss does here and I undoubtedly will in the districts at some point in the near future, then everything around them starts to seem rotten. Stupid, but true. As a species, we aren't nearly as clever as we like to pretend.  
  
There's a tap on the window. Caesar makes an impatient gesture at the Peacekeeper on the other side, then lets me out.  
  
I'm escorted back to my room and left there to build card houses while they play a new, expanded video, combining the deaths of my family with moments in both arenas. My brother burns to death, Katniss drops tracker jackers on me. My niece is buried under a pile of flaming rubble, Katniss runs toward the Cornucopia without looking back. (I didn't notice it at the time, but she told me, during one of the long nights on the train, that this had been eating at her.) The bakery falls to ruin. I kill Brutus. My mother is flash burned out of existence. Johanna screams at the sky about a whole country in rebellion. They've turned up the volume, and it's harder to tune out.  
  
I keep building. Two cards, leaning on each other. Another set. Cross them on top. Another set after that. Tiny diamond catacombs, staring at me mutely.  
  
Katniss drugs me in the cave. She almost forgets to kiss me before she leaves the next morning.  
  
Another level. Card on card. Concentrate.  
  
My father says, _Oh, Peeta._  
  
My hand shakes, and the whole structure comes down. I cover my ears, wait until I stop shaking, then start again.  
  
By the time the sky outside turns pink with sunset, I've started to adjust to the new volume. I am crying sometimes, I think, but it's just me and whoever is watching the feed, and I don't care. My family is dead. My district is gone. I think that's a place where it's okay to cry. I manage to get a five level card house built, and I step back from it without disturbing it.  
  
A blast of air comes from the filtration system and knocks it down.  
  
I will _not_ cry over a card house. I'm sure they want me to.  
  
Instead, I go to the shower and stand under the water for a long time. It's not the obsessive need to be clean that I had yesterday. I'm not sure what to make of it, but somewhere in the last twenty-four hours, I've stopped feeling the blood on my hands. No -- now, I just want the water running, making its white noise, blocking out the sounds of the video.  
  
I stay again until they turn off the supply, then go back to Katniss's bed and try to sleep. They don't turn down the volume, and every time I've almost dropped off, they make something explode or whistle or beep. Finally, it doesn't matter what they do. I put the pillow over my head, the way I used to when my parents fought, and sleep ambushes me.  
  
Unsurprisingly, I dream of my parents screaming at each other. At first, Mom is on her usual rant about where Dad has been and who he's been with (as far as I know, Dad was never actually unfaithful to her). Dad is shouting at her to stop shouting. This is the sort of thing they argued about. I wish I could pretend there had been some great substance to it. But it was always, _You smell like perfume_ / _Stop shouting_. Or _You threw away good money_ / _I make the money, anyway_. That one was always good. There was also the ever-popular _Sentimental idiot_ / _Stop screaming at the boys_ , of course, but that was family business and rarely shouted. And the dreaded, quiet, _If I ever see a bruise on any of them again, you can find another roof to live under._  
  
They only split up for real once. It was the first time Dad saw bruises on me. I was three, and I don't remember much, except for flashes of a nighttime walk, riding on Jonadab's back while Dad carried Ed. There was some kind of attic room after that. I don't know where it was, and never got the courage to ask about it. My brothers never talked about it. But we finally went home, and Dad said those words.  
  
I don't know if Dad meant it or not. I do know that most of Mom's lashes after that were verbal… and that, on the occasions when they weren't and I did have a mark, I lied to Dad about where it came from. The worst was the black eye when I was eleven. Dad closed the bakery after that and sent people home, and there was a screaming match. I swore that, while she'd yelled at me, I'd really gotten the black eye slipping in the mud by the pigsty and landing on a rock.  
  
I see myself there in the flames, swearing it again, promising that I was just clumsy, that Mom held back. I don't know why I do it. Mom never asked me to. But the image of riding away on Jonadab's back is too frightening to contemplate. I think Dad knows I'm lying, but he can't pin me down.  
  
Then the roof falls down in flames around us, and Mom is shrieking about the whole country in rebellion, and Dad is screaming crazily after he's killed someone.  
  
Next door, Delly Cartwright's brother is trying to play the flute. He hits a high note, and I wish the Cartwrights would make him stop. I'm trying to sleep in the fire and --  
  
I open my eyes. It's still night. There is a high pitched, extended whistle in the room. As soon as I roll over and look up, it stops.  
  
I lie in the dark, watching the flickering shadows from the video screens dance around the ceiling. I wonder if I can change the channel, but when I try, I just get ear-splitting feedback whines. Turning it off isn't possible, either. I think about Katniss's deafness after the explosion, and wonder if I could rupture my eardrums just to get some sleep, but I guess they'd find some other way, and I'd just end up being permanently deaf for my troubles.  
  
"I did what you want," I tell the empty room. "Can I just sleep for a few hours?"  
  
There's no noticeable response.  
  
I go back to the living room and build card houses. I can't get past the second level, and after a while, I can't get past the first.  
  
I sit on the couch, wrap myself in a blanket, and close my eyes.  
  
I drift. It’s not exactly sleeping, but it's better than nothing. I hear the battles on the screens around me, but I can't do anything about that. My mind just floats on top of it. I remember Katniss trying to teach me to swim. She said it didn't really count when I had the floatation device on. It pulled me up in the middle of my body. I wanted to take it off, because I thought I wasn't balanced, but I was a little afraid. I'd never really been in the water, other than when Finnick pulled me to land. I feel like that now, like there's something pulling me up, keeping my head above the water, but also pulling me in its own directions -- back to Twelve, to petty fights with my brothers. To the arena with Katniss, the beach, the pearl I gave her. To my studio in the Victors' Village, the smell of my paints, the sun coming through the windows.  
  
Somewhere in the fog, I hear voices.  
  
"You've got to stop this. What else do you want from him?"  
  
"I don't see where that's your concern, Caesar."  
  
"He's my concern. They're all my concern. You know that. What you're doing -- you're only going make things worse."  
  
"Might I suggest you stick to grinning at the monkeys in your audience and leave the war to me?"  
  
"This isn't the war. This is a seventeen year old kid who you're torturing for no reason at all. He's cooperating."  
  
"Only under duress."  
  
"You're not going to change that!"  
  
"We'll see." There is the scraping sound of a chair being pulled out. "I am trying to keep a nation together."  
  
"And I'm trying to help you do it right! Do you think I want to see the Capitol fall?"  
  
"There are times I wonder what you _do_ want."  
  
"I _don't_ want to see anyone else die for this. There's been enough death."  
  
After a long pause, Snow says, "There were survivors in Twelve. We lose their trail into the woods, and Alma Coin is harassing our hovercrafts. I would prefer we take them than that they do."  
  
"I somehow doubt that would be the majority opinion there after you burned their town to the ground."  
  
"I want to know where they'll go." I am suddenly poked with the tip of something, and I fight to open my eyes. "And someone is listening to the question. Are you awake, Peeta?"  
  
I try to say yes. It comes out as a kind of sigh.  
  
Warm hands end up on my shoulders, and I'm pushed into a sitting position. I'm aware that my eyes are open. Caesar is staring at me. "Peeta?" he says. "Peeta, are you all right?"  
  
"...can't sleep..." I manage.  
  
"Dammit, Coriolanus, turn this off!" Caesar makes a gesture at the screens.  
  
Snow shrugs and waves his hand, and the apartment is suddenly, amazingly silent. I bat at my ears to see if I can still hear. The sound of the disturbed air is strangely loud.  
  
"Did you hear what I need to know?" Snow asks.  
  
"Yeah."  
  
"And?"  
  
"And how would I know that? I wasn't there. I don't know where they'd go."  
  
"The fence was knocked down near the part of town you call the Seam."  
  
"Most people live there."  
  
"We have a surveillance photo. Tell me -- does this man look as familiar to you as he does to me?" He pulls out a photo and puts it down. It's from above and everyone is distorted, but it's enough to recognize the boy looking up as he shoos people down a hole in the fence.  
  
"Gale Hawthorne," I say. "But I guess you already know that."  
  
"He is... oh, what are we calling him lately? Your fiancée's cousin. Where would he take the people?"  
  
"Gale and I aren't friends. I have no idea where he'd go."  
  
"Where would Katniss go?"  
  
I'm ripped back suddenly to the mad days we spent training for the Quell, pretending it would make a difference. My anger at Haymitch flares -- he could have told us at any time -- but I force myself away from it. I see the three of us at the end of a run, Haymitch wheezing on a park bench. Katniss sits on the ground and stretches, looking around for bugs. Then she says, "Haymitch, Peeta needs to know about District Eight."  
  
I think at first that she just means the uprising she already mentioned, but instead, she tells me about two women she met in the woods.  
  
In the woods, at a cabin at a lake that she went to in order to clear her mind.  
  
"You have an answer for that, I see," Snow says.  
  
"No. I've never been outside the fence, except on the train. I don't know the woods."  
  
"You're not as good a liar as you think you are. I think it's time for a more serious conversation." He hits a button, and the elevator doors open. Two Peacekeepers come in. I wait to see who they've brought.  
  
One of them takes out a pair of handcuffs.  
  
Caesar gets in front of me. "Don't do this."  
  
"They both carry handcuffs, old friend. Don't overestimate my tolerance."  
  
Caesar turns to the guards. "Do you gentlemen understand where the President is taking this boy, and what will happen there?"  
  
"Take him in," Snow orders.  
  
There is a thud as Caesar is hit in the face with a gun. He crumples in front of me, and one of the Peacekeepers handcuffs him and drags him off.  
  
"We're not going to have any trouble, are we?" the other asks me.  
  
"You won't have any trouble," Snow says. "Will he, Peeta?"  
  
Behind those words, I hear the names: Caesar. Effie. Portia. Johanna. Annie. My preps. Darius. Lavinia.  
  
I shake my head.  
  
The Peacekeeper handcuffs me.  
  
I am taken down to a car, which I share with President Snow. As we head to wherever we are going, he tells me about various Capitol landmarks we pass along the way. Here is the memorial to the Green Tower, which was bombed during the Dark Days, costing the lives of more Capitol children in a matter of seconds than would be lost in the Games for at least twenty years. He was there that day, he tells me. He crawled over the bodies. There is the Fountain of Peace, a sculpture made from the identifying tags and equipment of soldiers lost in the war. And of course, the Games Museum, with the Hall of Tribute, where every tribute is remembered, along with scenes of his or her death. The more spectacular deaths rate dioramas.  There are still many empty halls in the sprawling complex, waiting for new deaths to decorate them.  
  
Finally, we reach a stone building surrounded by a high fence. Unsmiling Peacekeepers surround me.  
  
They march me inside, down sterile corridors lined with lights trapped in unbreakable cages. Snow goes in front of us. I can see prisoners through some of the doors, which are made of steel but set with one small window. The window is covered on some of them. We stop in front of one, and Snow thumbs a key beside it. The covering raises and I hear a war whoop. Johanna's face appears in the window. Snow waves at her, and the guards shove me forward.  
  
"Peeta!" she yells. "Tell them to shove it, they're going to hurt you anyway, so don't give anything up!"  
  
Snow closes the window. I can still hear her shouting behind it. "I thought you might appreciate a friendly face," he says.  
  
The Peacekeepers open the next door and push me inside. The cell is actually fairly large. A metal table is bolted to the floor. There is a bunk in the back, and a toilet in full view of the cameras. There are a lot of mechanical looking things in the ceiling. I can't identify them, but I don't like them. And of course, a screen on the wall. Snow activates it, and it starts to show my personal videos again, though thankfully without sound for now.  
  
I am handcuffed to the table.  The cuffs are attached by chains from the opposite corners, and hold my arms spread out, the heels of my hands flat on the metal surface.  My back is bent uncomfortably.  
  
Snow sits down across from me. "Now, where did we leave off?"  
  
"With me telling you I never went outside the fence in District Twelve. Which I never did. I think my dad was outside it once, but... not many people went there."  
  
"Gale Hawthorne and Katniss Everdeen did."  
  
"I don't know if you've guessed this, but he's not actually her cousin, and they didn't invite me on their dates. And she didn't exactly tell me long stories about them, either."  
  
Snow smirks unpleasantly. "I had reports on their activities near the fence. Would you like to hear them?"  
  
I wonder what Snow will tell me if I say yes. Katniss already told me about the kiss, which confused her too much to do anything else.  
  
Unless that was a lie.  
  
I blink, not considering that too closely. I don't think she'd lie to me about that. She wouldn't have any reason to. I told her I was all right with it. I told her she didn't have to be loyal to me when it was just us.  
  
She wouldn't have lied.  
  
I shrug, as if nothing in the world could matter less.  
  
Suddenly, the chains on the handcuffs jerk my wrists down on the table, pressing against the bones in my wrist, cutting the skin.  
  
I am too surprised to scream.  
  
"I can keep tightening," Snow says calmly. "Easiest thing in the world from my side. It will break your bones. Eventually, it will damage the nerves in those talented hands."  
  
"You're going to kill me, anyway," I manage to say, though my muscles are so tense trying to fight against the pull of the chains that it comes out as a gasp.  
  
He sniffs. The pressure stabilizes, lets up a little. "Because Johanna Mason said so? My dear boy, of the two of us, which has lied to you from the start?"  
  
"If you break my hands, they'll notice on camera," I try.  
  
"A good point," Snow says. He releases pressure on the handcuffs, then gestures to a Peacekeeper. "Break a rib." He smiles at me. "We'll cover it up with a nice shirt."  
  
I have no defense. The Peacekeeper takes his baton from his belt and slams it into my ribcage from the side. I hear the bone crack, and my chest is on fire. I can't keep from screaming this time, and the motion of the scream makes it hurt even more.  
  
From the other side of the wall, I hear Johanna shout, "You leave him alone! Leave him alone! I'll kill you!"  
  
Snow sighs. "Miss Mason is becoming tedious. Please bring her in, if she'd like to join the conversation in a more productive capacity."  
  
"Don't do anything to Johanna," I say.  
  
"Or what?"  
  
"Just please don't."  
  
A moment later, Johanna is shoved through the door. She trips over the chains that bind her legs and falls to the floor. Peacekeepers drag her to her feet, then push her to her knees. She glares out defiantly. "Whatever they do, Peeta, you don't give them _anything_."  
  
"Johanna..."  
  
"Now," Snow says, "about the matter of a refuge for survivors of the bombing."  
  
"I don't know!" I insist, but the image of Katniss at a cabin at a lake comes back again.  
  
One of the guards grabs Johanna's hand and pushes back one of her fingers, either breaking it or pulling it out of joint. She screams.  
  
"Stop it!"  
  
"Don't pay attention!" Johanna gasps. "Just ignore me."  
  
Snow looks at her, bored, then says, "I have a special treat for you, Johanna. Inspired by Beetee's plan in the arena. There's plenty of usable wire left on the spool. I had it brought back just for you."  
  
She spits at him.  
  
"You don't have to do this!" I tell him.  
  
A hook comes down from the ceiling, and Johanna's guards string the chain of her handcuffs over it. One of them draws a knife.  
  
"Please don't!" I yell.  
  
The guard buries his hand in Johanna's spiky hair, pulls her head back.  
  
And cuts off a fistful of hair.  
  
A cut opens in her scalp and she starts to bleed.  
  
"It gets very smelly," Snow explains. "If the hair starts burning."  
  
The bloody clump of hair falls to the ground, and another falls beside it. Johanna flails, but she's caught tightly in the chains.  
  
I try to get up, but the chains on my own cuffs start to pull again.  
  
"Stop it! Please, just stop it!"  
  
The knife cuts across Johanna's skull again, taking a chunk of skin from her forehead along with the hair. The other Peacekeeper gets his knife as well, starting in on the side of her head. He's even clumsier with it, opening up a gash above her ear.  
  
Blood patters to the floor of the cell. It is dripping down her face, shockingly red, leaving streaks like she's tried to finger paint herself. When I woke up in the cave and found Katniss with a head wound, much of the blood had congealed to a rusty shade of brown, but this is so fresh and bright that it almost looks fake against Johanna's pale skin, almost glowing in the gray of the cell. Like paint dripping down a fresh canvas. I think crazily of my studio again. And then about the green in the Victors' Village. About Katniss and the lake.  
  
Johanna bites at a hand that comes too close to her mouth, and is backhanded for her trouble. Her feet don't quite touch the floor, and she swings viciously, her arms twisting until they catch her and start shaving again.  
  
"Almost done," Snow says. "Now, I think I may have to watch the tape again, to remember exactly how Beetee wrapped that tree." He smiles at Johanna. "One more time as a tree, my dear. Then it'll all be over."  
  
She fights uselessly against the Peacekeepers.  
  
"Please, stop," I say.  
  
"Peeta, ignore it!" she yells.  
  
"I can't! Please, President Snow... please... I'll tell you everything."


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peeta spins a lie to protect the survivors in Twelve, and Snow makes him pay for it when he finds out.

**Part Two: Jabberjays**

  
  
**Chapter 4**  
Whenever we wanted to start a jabberjay drill, Ed or Jonadab would say, "The jabberjays are listening, Peeta." It meant that the game was on. It was time to start spinning stories. At first, we all did it. Ed and Jonadab were both pretty good. But after a while, it became something that _I_ did, something that made my big brothers laugh. It was one of the few things we all enjoyed.  
  
I am not going to enjoy it this time.  
  
"Peeta, don't!" Johanna cries. "Don't give them anything!"  
  
"I have to," I say. And it's true. I can't let them hurt Johanna anymore. I also can't give them whoever has survived District Twelve.   
  
It's a jabberjay drill again, but the stakes are higher than anything I ever played for. Whatever I say, it has to be completely plausible. Snow will have to believe that I'd hold it back. It will have to make sense. And it can't get the Capitol anywhere near the lake. I hope I'm remembering right that it's southwest of town. Dad told me that the Everdeens once had property southwest of town, before the fence was sealed.  
  
"I'm waiting," Snow says.  
  
"I'm trying to think of where to start," I say. "It's true that I never went out there. And for all I know, Gale went someplace else entirely. I don't know him very well."  
  
"But you remember something," Snow says, his voice a low hiss.  
  
"It might not be anything."  
  
The chains tighten my cuffs again, and I shake my head. Enough hesitation will help. Too much, he'll think I'm playing him.  "Stop! Stop, this is it." I have to think of something, anything.  I push my mind deep into itself, look for anything at all I can use. I see myself at Katniss's, watching the programming from the Capitol.  Watching for a sign.  It's all I have.  "It's Thirteen!" I say. "They know about it."  
  
Snow frowns. "I beg your pardon?"  
  
I close my eyes. I'm reasonably sure I look terrified, since I am terrified. I can only hope I look ashamed. "They know about Thirteen. Katniss and Gale. A few other people. It's the mockingjay."  
  
"The mockingjay?"  
  
"In all the footage from the news. The same mockingjay goes by the corner. People talk about it. And about why the building is still smoldering. They figure the Capitol must not be allowed to go in and film. And if you're not allowed, then there must be someone there not allowing you, right?"  
  
Snow's jaw tightens and he breathes in sharply through his nose. "This is a common rumor?"  
  
"Maybe not common, but I'm not the only one who's heard it." I cast around inside my head for some thread of a story, something I can use. I have to trust that Thirteen is strong enough to defend itself and whoever is under its protection. The mockingjay on the news is a start, but it doesn't go anywhere. It doesn't lead to any place that I can give Snow.  
  
At least it seems to have caught his attention.  
  
I wait to see if he's going to produce something to contradict me, but he doesn't. He just fumes at the oversight, which is very real, and he'll be able to verify it. So far, so good.  
  
I put in the first embellishment. "Katniss said she talked to Gale about it a lot before the Games... about how they could go off and find their way to District Thirteen."  
  
Snow narrows his eyes suspiciously. "And she discussed this with _you_?"  
  
I nod and look down at the table, as if he's struck on a shameful secret. "She... she pretty much only kept up the pretense about us where there were cameras or bugs," I tell him. "The rest of the time, we told each other the truth. We're friends. She's my best friend."   
  
"Your best friend." Snow wrinkles his nose, and I have him. I can feel that. It's what he wants to believe, anyway, so this far, it's easy, even with the pain in my wrists, even with Johanna twisting from the chains a few feet away.  
  
"I wanted more, okay? But it just wasn't there." I think about the last night on the beach, the feel of her skin under my hands, the fast beat of her pulse, the pressure of her fingers on my back. I force it away. Force myself to think about her kneeling beside Gale when he'd been whipped, about the kiss they shared in the woods, about the way they smiled at each other while we were training for the Quell. I let my voice shake a little. "She wanted to be with him."  
  
"I am not entirely surprised," Snow says. "I also don't particularly care. How does this reflect on where Gale Hawthorne has gone?"  
  
I take a deep breath. It's shaky and somehow thick. I can feel my broken rib, and I'm afraid it's torn something. I clench my teeth. I think about Katniss. And her mother, and my father, and finally I get an inkling of an idea.  
  
I don't know much about the outside of the fence, but there is a story my father told me when I asked about Mrs. Everdeen. When they were children, they dared each other to slip under the fence and follow the train tracks. I used to imagine that long walk, how it would have been if they'd just kept walking. I don't know how often I asked him for details. Often enough that he finally got frustrated and said, "Peeta, I've told you everything."  
  
The whole story comes into my head. They will need a goal. They'll need a reason. They'll need water and hunting grounds. And Dad's story has it all. All I need to do is replace Dad and Mrs. Everdeen with Gale and Katniss. I promise myself that I'll thank him later, remember that I won't be able to, and make myself go on anyway.  
  
"Katniss told me... she said..."  
  
"What?"  
  
I look down. I have to be ashamed of myself for telling. "She said they used to walk along the train tracks. That they'd go around the fence to the other side of town and they'd walk up there, up toward Thirteen. They'd daydream about life outside District Twelve. They just wanted to get away, be someplace where no one else was calling the shots."  
  
Snow smiles bitterly. "They may find themselves unpleasantly surprised." He doesn't explain. "Go on."  
  
"Anyway, you can follow the tracks for a few miles out of town. I don't know how many. As many as you can cover in about five hours, I guess. But then there's a ravine. The tracks used to go across, but they must have been bombed in the war. She says they're melted. They look like they were tied in a knot."   
  
"Fascinating, I'm sure. But if they can't get through, then I don't see why you'd think they'd be there."  
  
"The thing is, there's a river at the bottom of the gorge. Water. Fish. And there's enough leaf cover out there that the whole thing is probably hidden from a hovercraft. A lot of people could be hidden there. They could even make shelters from the trees." I shrug and look down. "That's why I thought of it. He knows the place, and it has what he'd need. And I'll bet Thirteen keeps an eye out for stragglers there, anyway."  
  
I chance a look up. Snow is frowning at me.  
  
"That's all I know," I say. "It's everything."  
  
Finally, Snow nods. "All right. Take Miss Mason back to her cell. And send in a hovercraft north of town."  
  
The Peacekeepers leave with Johanna.   
  
Snow stays. "I recommend not withholding information from me again."  
  
I close my eyes. "I'm sorry. I was just scared of what you'd do if I was wrong."  
  
"Well, I assure you, you'll find out when the reports come in."  
  
He leaves, locking my cell door behind him. I imagine I will not like whatever happens when he finds no sign at all of District Twelve in the ravine. At least I hope he doesn't -- it really is a plausible place for them to go. But hopefully, it will waste enough of his time for the rebels to find the survivors.  
  
The cuffs on my wrists abruptly release, leaving me free to wander my cell. They turn up the volume on my video, and now they've cut in pictures of Gale giving interviews about Katniss, and the surveillance photograph of him at the fence is intercut with footage of my family burning to death.  
  
I go over to the wall I share with Johanna. There is small air vent at the top, and I speak to it. "Are you okay?"  
  
Her voice comes up, echoing flatly on the metal. "Don't talk to me."  
  
"I'm sorry."  
  
"He's just going to kill them, you know. You just killed them all. You should have let them kill me. He's going to, anyway."  
  
I wonder if supposed to apologize for not letting them murder her in front of me. It doesn't seem polite, so I don't say anything. I go to the cot to lie down and my rib sends out another wave of agony. I bite my hand to keep from crying out. When the wave finally passes, I stare at the ceiling, wondering what pain is going to come from each of the arms and vices I see there.   
  
On the screen, Katniss sits in front of Caesar Flickerman, and can't even come up with a good lie about when she supposedly fell in love with me. My sister-in-law runs away, the baby under a blanket to protect her from the smoke. The building falls on them.  
  
I close my eyes. Sleep is an impossibility, caught between the pain in my rib and the horribly loud video, but I let myself drift again. I want the playing cards. I want to build something. I imagine building. One card, balanced against another. District Twelve survivors, balanced against Johanna Mason. My family dead, balanced against Katniss surviving. Placed together. Covered by one lie, hanging over the edge, waiting to fall. I try to find something else to brace it.  
  
Somewhere in the room, Katniss stammers through an interview.  
  
I think about the beach again, and this time, I don't push it away. I let myself feel it. I remember every second. I want her, not just physically. I don't want to talk. I don't have anything to say. I don't even necessarily want to caress or kiss her. I just want her here. Or I want to be where she is. I feel like I'd be perfectly happy if we were just sitting in her living room, working on her plant book, or watching some ridiculous programming on the television while she tries to spot a mockingjay in District Thirteen.  
  
This pulls my mind to a sunlit afternoon, when her foot was healing. I looked up, and I saw her looking at me. I looked up _because_ she was looking at me. I could feel her eyes on me, a soft, tentative, fluttering caress. I remember a moment's thought that I was something to her... maybe more than something. Maybe a _lot_ more. But I pushed it aside. I didn't believe my own eyes.  
  
I should have gone to her and kissed her then. I'd have known for sure. I could have suggested that we do the toasting and forget about the Capitol, like I said in the interview. A part of me wonders what she would have said that day.  
  
I try to tell myself a story about it. A story where I didn't lie, where we've been married for months, where we're expecting a child. It will be a girl. She'll look like Katniss. I'll have her in the kitchen with me while I bake, and I'll toss a little flour at her, and she'll laugh, her face covered with white powder. She will ask me for a story, and I'll tell her that once upon a time, I loved the girl in the rain, the girl who looked up at me and _saw_ me standing there in my mother's shadow. The girl whose eye I could never seem to catch after that, though I saw her frequently lurking in the shadows nearby. "That's Mommy!" my daughter will say and clap, because she knows this story well. It is her favorite. And I will say, "That's just right, and aren't you glad we finally figured it out?"  
  
Katniss calls my name from somewhere in the video, and I open my eyes in time to see her shoot at the forcefield. The lightning comes down and throws her backward, hurting her badly, and if she had been pregnant, it would have killed the baby. There will never be a little girl. The bakery is gone. The story is a lie I made up for the Games.  
  
Through the vent, I can hear Johanna crying in her sleep until she wakes up with a furious scream.  
  
"Johanna?" I call.  
  
After a minute, she says, "I'm here."  
  
"Me, too," I say. There is nothing else to say.  
  
The afternoon moves into evening, with no way to tell other than the clock on the wall. At six, the door opens, and a guard comes in carrying a tray. She chances eye contact as she sets the tray down and gives me a sympathetic smile. I take the cover off the tray and close my eyes.  
  
There is a loaf of bread that I'd recognize anywhere -- I made it every day. It is sitting in a blackened, cracked, and melted pan which it was obviously not baked in. I can just make out the words "Mellark Bakery" etched into the lip.  
  
I push it away, not hungry.  
  
An hour later, Caesar comes. He has a black eye, but otherwise seems all right. He has brought the basket of cards. He looks distastefully at the bread pan. "Snow told me they'd been digging through the ruins looking for survivors."  
  
"Looking for something, anyway," I say.  
  
"Are you all right?"  
  
"Better than Johanna is," I say. "Johanna?"  
  
She calls back. "Still here."  
  
Caesar grimaces. "I’m pretty useless at keeping you safe. I'm so sorry. I thought... I thought Coriolanus would listen a little bit longer."  
  
"Why would you think that?"  
  
"Simple enough. We share a granddaughter. Our children were wiser than either of us, so of course they 'disappeared' during a diplomatic trip. But we have Prisca. They'd left her with Coriolanus. It was dangerous to travel in the out-districts." He grimaces, then adds, "Prisca thinks we're on even footing, despite all evidence. Generally, he takes her feelings into account. I overestimated."  
  
I don't have anything to say to this.  
  
"Let me see your hands," he says. I hold them out and he inspects the cuts from the cuffs, and the dark bruises that are starting to form on my wrists. "Anything else?"  
  
"Broken rib," I say.  
  
"I'll make sure a medic comes down."  
  
"For Johanna, too? She got cut."  
  
"I'll try." He looks at my hands for a long time, then flings them down in frustration and goes to the wall. "Johanna, it's Caesar. Are you all right?"  
  
"Oh, I'm great," she calls sarcastically. "It's a real vacation in here. You ever try it?"  
  
He puts his hand on the wall and says, "Hold on. Just hold on, all right?"  
  
Johanna doesn't answer.  
  
I don't know what else to say, and Caesar doesn't look to be going anywhere, so I say, "I never heard that your son...?"  
  
"Daughter."  
  
"--that your daughter went off with Snow's son."  
  
He gives me a weary roll of the eyes. "My great secret is that I was born in District Five. I don't talk about it. Not a lot of fond memories. My family was not particularly popular there. But I gave my daughter my original name. I thought it might keep her out of the spotlight. No one here remembers it. No one thought twice when she married Martius. They thought she was just my secretary. That's the way we both wanted it."  
  
I understand this, and nod.  
  
"Anyway, Snow wouldn't admit to the country that his granddaughter is more than a little bit District Five. We have that to hold over each other, too. Usually. But I was forcefully reminded that any hold I have is an illusion. It's sometimes hard to tell here."  
  
"Thanks for trying."  
  
He shakes his head. "I'll see if I can get you some food you can actually look at."  
  
With that, he leaves.  
  
Fifteen minutes later, they turn off the sound on my videos, and half an hour after that, Valentine, the medic from my prep team, comes in, carrying an emergency bag.  
  
She smiles faintly. Her hands are shaking. I see one of her own fingers is in a splint. Carefully, she touches my side, where the deep purple bruise above the rib is. I gasp at the pain.  
  
She presses harder, and I almost faint.  
  
"It's fractured, I think," she says. "But just a crack.  There's no broken edge. The only thing to do is kill the pain while it heals." She hands me a pill, and I take it gratefully. It occurs to me after I swallow it that it could be poison, but nothing happens. I don't really care. A quick dose of poison seems better than finding out what the equipment in the ceiling does.  
  
"I thought something in there ripped," I say.  
  
She inspects the bruise. "There's soft tissue damage," she says. "Be careful. Give it a little respect."  
  
I nod. "Are you okay?"  
  
"Yeah. They're keeping me upstairs with Claudia and Sergius. Claudia has a sprained ankle, but that's the worst of it."  
  
"Are you going to be able to look in on Johanna?"  
  
"After I've finished looking you over," she says.  
  
She sits me down on the table and looks me over. Aside from the rib and the cuts on my wrists (which she puts some kind of ointment on), she looks over my injuries from the arena and checks the connections on my leg. When she's finished, she carefully hugs me and kisses my cheek. She seems unable to speak after this, and scurries out. I hear her speaking quietly to Johanna a minute later.  
  
I go to my bunk and close my eyes. For the first time since they locked me up, I am free of the videos. I fall asleep almost instantly. If I dream, I am unaware of it.  
  
I wake up very suddenly when the volume comes back on with a great explosion. More screens have been installed around me, and I can now see the forcefield blowing up above my head.  
  
I blink and sit up. The pill Valentine gave me has worn off, and I scream at the pain in my side, which I've forgotten to respect.  
  
When I adjust to it, I blink, and realize that I'm not alone in my cell. President Snow is sitting at the table, flanked by Peacekeepers. There are three small metal boxes in front of him, and larger ones beside him.  
  
"Good morning, Peeta. I trust you slept well."  
  
"It's a lot easier in the quiet," I say. "What time is it?"  
  
"It's afternoon. You've been asleep for more than eighteen hours. A lot can be accomplished in eighteen hours."  
  
I look at him warily. "I noticed the new screens."  
  
"Child's play." He taps the boxes in front of him. "We've gotten back from District Twelve, Peeta. Do you know what we found at the ravine along the train tracks?" He doesn't wait for an answer. "Absolutely nothing. There's no sign of any recent visit. And while we were there, hovercrafts from Thirteen appeared about six miles southwest of the fence. Intelligence tells me that there were nearly nine hundred people there, at a lake."  
  
"Oh. I told you I might be wrong. I've never been in the woods."  
  
"Curiously, you were wrong in almost the precise opposite direction of where we ought to have been looking." I don't say anything. There's not a good way to embellish the lie without being tangled in it. Snow smiles. "Never mind. It wasn't an entire loss. We were able to search the rubble of the city. No survivors, I'm afraid, but I have a few things for you to identify."  
  
He opens the first box, and I recoil. At the bottom, in a pool of viscous fluid, is a charred human forearm. A gold band has melted over the hand and re-solidified. A small green stone floats on it. My mother's engagement ring. When she backhanded me over the bread I gave Katniss, the stone left a scratch on my cheek after the spatula raked my eye. I'm glad I haven't eaten, because my gorge rises at the sight and smell of it. "You know who she is," I say. "You don't need me to identify her."  
  
"I do apologize. This is all we could find of her in the square," Snow says. He opens the other two small boxes. I refuse to look. He pushes them in front of me and the Peacekeepers pull me to my feet. I know I am looking at what remains of my father and my brother Ed -- Snow wouldn't have a reason to bring them, otherwise -- but I can't see anything that identifies them. There is a foot, burned black and curled up, in one box, and a jawbone in the other. "They were found at the remains of the stocks," Snow confirms. He points to the wall, where I see that they've installed shelves, and, to my utter disgust, has them put all three boxes there, lit up like grotesque knick-knacks.  
  
I look at the larger boxes, and I know what's in them. I try to will Snow not to open them, but it doesn't work.  
  
"These bodies were found under a wall," he says. "Better preserved. The woman and child may even have died of smoke inhalation."  
  
He opens the first. My sister-in-law, Sarey, lies in a glass-topped coffin full of the same fluid my mother's arm is in. Her skin is gray where it hasn't been burned red, but she is completely recognizable. Someone has even styled the remains of her long blond hair.  
  
The next coffin is my brother Jonadab. He is burned more severely, but much of his face is still intact. There's even one eyebrow that's undamaged. I see his arms, which used to be so tight when we play-wrestled, usually when he was supposed to be babysitting. He would get me in a headlock, then mess up my hair and threaten to do awful things that he'd never go through with. Then he'd sneak us pastries, which he'd get in trouble for later. I think of riding on his back, away from the bakery, Dad following us with Ed in his arms. My stomach clenches, and I fight to keep my gorge down.  
  
Snow goes to the last box. It is larger than the small parts of my parents and my middle brother, but it's too small. I close my eyes. "Please don't," I whisper.  
  
I hear the lid open.  
  
"Open your eyes, Peeta," Snow says.  
  
I shake my head.  
  
"Open them. This is what Katniss Everdeen did to your family."  
  
" _You_ did it," I say.  
  
"Open your eyes."  
  
There is a sharp, jarring pain as someone hits my broken rib, and my eyes open of their own accord.  
  
My niece Betony, unburned and looking fully herself, is in the last box. She is six months old. She will never get older. Her bright blue eyes look up through the preserving liquid.  
  
"Shall I leave them to keep you company?" Snow asks.  
  
I shake my head.  
  
"Very well." He closes the coffins. "But if you need to be reminded not to lie to me again, I believe that young Betony will serve for it." With a flick of his hand, he orders the Peacekeepers to wheel out the coffins. They do not remove the bits of my parents and Ed.  
  
Snow gets up to leave, then stops at the door. "Oh, how careless of me," he says. "I did promise that you'd be the first to know when I got intelligence on Miss Everdeen's condition. I have a source in the hospital in District Thirteen -- or I did until this morning. He was able to get out a single message before he was arrested. She's recovering well. Making new friends. Re-connecting with old ones." He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a photograph, which he tosses across the table to me. It shows Katniss in a sickbed. Gale is beside her, holding her hand, looking at her tenderly.  
  
Snow grins and leaves my cell, locking the door behind him.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Snow torments Peeta further, and Caesar reveals why he cares so much about the tributes.

**Chapter 5**  
By the third day of my life in prison, I've adjusted to the videos. I know each scene now. I know exactly where they put in the pictures of Katniss that I'm not supposed to see. My rib is still painful, but I've adjusted to that as well. They've stopped hurting me directly. They ask me to do a commercial for the Capitol, telling them that I understand why the Games need to be awful and the districts need to be disciplined. I refuse to speak when the cameras come, and next door, Johanna is beaten. She screams at me the whole time to stick to whatever I'm doing or she'll never forgive me for it.  
  
I have a feeling that she won't forgive me either way. I don't do the commercial. I can't see any way that it would help anyone.  
  
I go to the vent after everyone has left and ask Johanna if she's okay.  
  
"I can take it," she says quietly. "Keep fighting."  
  
The next day, the Avoxes from the Training Center are moved in across the hall from me. A camera is installed in their cell, with a feed directly into mine. Their clothes have been taken, and, more ominously given Snow's threat to Johanna, their heads have been shaved. Lavinia is trying to cover herself. Darius tries to shield her from the camera.  
  
Lavinia jerks back as a mist fills the room, and when it clears, I see that the floor is covered with water.  
  
Three Peacekeepers come in, wearing heavy, rubber-soled boots. Two of them drag Darius away and set him on a bunk. He makes gestures at them, some of which I know are vulgar, others of which make no sense to me at all.  
  
I guess they must refer to something Peacekeepers know, because one of the men laughs and says, "If you gave a damn about the Rules of Conduct, you wouldn't be here, would you? Because rule number one is that you're at the pleasure of the Capitol."  
  
Darius holds up his hand and waves four fingers at him emphatically.  
  
Before I can process what I'm seeing, the Peacekeeper grabs Darius's hand and cuts off his little finger. "Try quoting the rules now," he quips as Darius screams and buries his bloody hand against his side.  
  
The guard laughs merrily.  
  
Darius holds up the other hand. The gesture he makes with it is not a number.  
  
The Peacekeeper laughs and turns his back. He hits button on the wall and a hook comes down from the ceiling, the same sort of hook they hung Johanna from when Snow had her brought to my cell. They bind Lavinia's hands and hang her up from it by the chain.  
  
"What do you know about the mockingjay?" one of them asks, casually pulling something else down. I see that it's a black cord. At the end of it is a two pronged prod. Lightning arcs between the prongs.  
  
I go to my door and pound on it. "What are you doing? She can't answer you!"  
  
The Peacekeeper grins over his shoulder at me. He pokes Lavinia with his finger. "Should we have some fun with you first?" he asks.  
  
I pound on the door. I can hear Johanna doing the same. "Let her be!" I yell.  
  
Lavinia curls up her legs and kicks him hard in the belly.  
  
He jams the prod into her chest.  
  
The entire cell flashes white, like the arena when Katniss blew the forcefield. There is a sound like the crack of a whip.  
  
When the light fades, Lavinia is hanging limp from the ceiling.  
  
One of the other Peacekeepers grabs the prod away. "You idiot! She's dead! You hit her with too much!"  
  
Darius tries to step off the bunk, but the water on the floor still holds a charge, and he's thrown back.  
  
The Peacekeepers take down Lavinia's body and drag it out of the cell. Darius huddles on the bunk, cradling his hand, while the water on the floor is vacuumed down a drain.  
  
The feed from the cell breaks off, and my screen goes back to the burning of Twelve. With the hour, they've cut in a picture of Lavinia dying. It comes after Katniss drops tracker jackers on me.   
  
I pick up the cards Caesar left, and start building. The metal table doesn’t hold them as well as the wooden one in the Training Center did, and they have a tendency to slip. When I do manage a level or two, a blast of air inevitably breaks it. I am no longer surprised at the level of pettiness they manage to work in along with the horrors.  
  
Caesar comes down with a camera crew the next day and starts shooting Darius's cell and Johanna's. When the head guard tells him he has to stop, he produces orders from Snow telling him to show how well everyone is being treated.  
  
All of us are given medical care. The cells are cleaned up. Darius is given clothes and a blanket. Caesar's people film us.  
  
Outside my cell door, Caesar says, "Yes, that's much better. I'm sure they'll be wanting regular reports. Peeta and Johanna are very well-liked by the audience."  
  
"You should be fixing that," the head guard says.  
  
"You overestimate my persuasive powers." He pauses. "I need to talk to Peeta."  
  
"Is that approved?"  
  
I peek through the window. Caesar shuffles papers around and finally comes up with one that seems to appease the guard. The door opens.  
  
Caesar comes in and sits down at my table. He's brought a simple chicken sandwich, which he gives me, along with a glass of water. It's possibly the best meal I've ever had.  
  
"You're already losing weight," he says. "What have they been sending down?"  
  
"Just water. I guess if I don't eat the bread, they think I'm not hungry." I nod toward the bread in the bakery pan, which I've put beside Mom's hand on the shelves. By now, I'm sure that it's stale enough that Mom would let us take it off the shelf and eat it ourselves.  
  
"That was four days ago," Caesar says. I nod. He grinds his teeth. "They're supposed to be feeding you."  
  
"That's not your fault. I told them I wouldn't do a spot for them. They beat up Johanna."  
  
Caesar stands up abruptly and pounds on Johanna's wall. "Jo! Hang in there."  
  
She pounds back, but more weakly than I tend to expect from Johanna. Her voice floats through the vent. "Sooner or later, I'll hang _somewhere_ , won't I?"  
  
"Not if I can stop it."  
  
Johanna laughs. It's a strange, frightening, dead sound as it bounces off the walls.  
  
Caesar looks down. We manage a few more almost-pleasantries, then he leaves.  
  
I'm awakened the next morning by Darius's screams. I hear them in stereo, both across the hall and on my screen.  
  
"What do you know about the mockingjay?" a guard demands.  
  
Darius makes a prolonged, animal sound. A knife flashes, and his hand starts bleeding again. His thumb is gone.  
  
"Have you seen the project specs?"  
  
Darius shakes his head wildly and groans, waving his intact hand at his missing tongue.  
  
"What do you know? What have you seen?"  
  
The electric prod comes out, and Darius screams miserably.  
  
The guard waves a folder in front of him. There is a picture of Katniss on it. "Have you seen this before?" he demands. "Tell me!"  
  
Darius shakes his head again, wailing something.  
  
The feed is cut. It isn't replaced with anything, and I can still hear Darius screaming. Johanna is up now, yelling to make them stop. My lights go out. Someone closes the blinds over the window. Darius's and Johanna's screams are the only thing in the world, punctuated by an occasional, very loud demand to know whatever Darius learned in District Twelve about "the mockingjay."  
  
I hear a soft whisk of something coming at me, and a sharp pain behind my knees, like a bee sting. Darius's screams grow louder.  
  
I have no way of knowing how long this goes on. It seems like forever. Screams. Demands. More screams. Finally, the screams fade away to low sobbing, and my lights come on. The window in my door opens. I look out. There are janitors in the hall outside. They are picking up red things from the floor.  
  
Fingers and toes, I realize. Darius's fingers and toes. Something starts to totter in my head. Some of them still seem to be moving. I blink and they stop.  
  
Darius is curled up on the floor of his cell, bleeding and crying.  
  
I remember that he liked goat cheese tarts. This memory comes out of nowhere and goes back just as quickly.  
  
I go back to my bunk. I am shaking. Not just a little tremor, but a serious, full-on shake, like my body is trying to jitter apart. I imagine my fingers and toes falling off. I can't seem to stop. I grasp at odd things in my head, and find there aren't many there. All I can think of are fingers and toes.  
  
"Goat cheese tarts," I say out loud. I remember they were expensive, but I can't remember the price. I close my eyes and try to see the inside of the bakery. The ovens. The bread racks. Were they metal or wood? Other than the tarts and bread, what did we make? Cheese buns. I made cheese buns.  
  
I pull my knees up to my chest and try to remember the ingredients. I made them almost every day for Katniss. It ought to be easy. "Water," I whisper. "Yeast. Sugar. Flour. Grated cheese. Garlic." I'm forgetting something. I say the recipe over again. "Water. Yeast. Sugar. Cheese. Garlic."  
  
Darius screams across the hall, and the lights flicker. There is a sound like a whip.  
  
The shaking increases. I can't remember what I was listing ingredients for.  
  
Glass cases in the bakery. A new pretend cake for the front window in each season, frosted onto a wooden box Dad made for it. The last one I made was spring before the Games, with flowers and bees and mountain grasses.  
  
"Forget-me-nots," I say. "The flowers were forget-me-nots."  
  
The lights go out again, other than the ones on my mother's hand, and the unidentifiable bits of my brother and father. I think the foot is Ed's. His feet were bigger than Dad's.  
  
"Ed hated baking," I say to no one.  
  
"What are you talking about?" Johanna asks through the vent.  
  
"Nothing."  
  
"Then stop, and get some sleep."  
  
"What color are forget-me-nots?" I ask.  
  
There is a long time before she says, "Yellow? I think we had them in fields. I don't remember."  
  
I try to picture my last cake. I don't think it was yellow. I can't remember forget-me-nots.  
  
I finally go to sleep when Darius stops screaming and goes back to whimpering. I dream of the bakery, but it is blurry, and parts of it disappear when I look directly at them. My mother's engagement ring is melted all over her hand. She slaps me, and there's a sharp pain at the base of my neck. I bleed into the bread dough, and start to apologize for ruining the batch, but Mom tells me it's brilliant, and Dad is already selling loaves one after another. We have to make more. She holds out my hands and pours my blood into the bowl.  
  
It is raining outside, and Katniss is there, sitting in the mud, starving. I want to give her some of the bread we're baking, but Mom says we can't afford to give away our livelihood to beggars. I feed it all to the pigs. One of them bites me on the shoulder, and my head is full of agony. The world wavers. The bakery collapses in flames behind me. Darius, in his Peacekeeper uniform, is dragged out of the fire.  
  
Beside me, one of Darius's guards also tosses in his own treat for the pigs. Katniss's fingers and toes. Her nails are painted like they were for her first interview with Caesar -- a flame motif to go with her dress. She lies dead in the mud while another guard demands that she tell him about the mockingjay project.  
  
I run to her, knowing she's dead, but wanting it not to be true. I hold her. Stroke her hair.  
  
Her feathers.  
  
I look down. Her hair has turned to shiny feathers. Her clothes are goose down. She's grown new fingers, and they're talons. They seem queerly bright in the gray daylight.  
  
"Katniss, no," I whisper.  
  
She opens her eyes and raises one of her talons to my throat, and I feel it cutting into my skin, squeezing...  
  
I open my eyes and find a doctor hovering over me with a syringe. My cell is gone. I am in a hospital room, though I am cuffed to the bed by both wrists and tight restraints cover my ankles.  
  
On the ceiling, bright snakes crawl in and out of the lighting fixtures, and black feathers fall around me like coal-blackened snow.  
  
I hear voices from beyond the door.  
  
"I'm going in and I'm going to see him!"  
  
I think it is Haymitch at first, Haymitch come to find me like he did after the Games, when I found out my leg was gone. But it's not Haymitch's voice, and someone tells him he doesn't have clearance.  
  
I look down at my legs and scream. The artificial leg is gone, replaced by a grinning lizard with sharp teeth that clamp down around my knee. Its tail swishes back and forth  
  
Someone bursts through the door, and I think it's my father, but my father never had hair this shade of--  
  
"Blue!" I yell. "They're blue! Forget-me-nots. They're blue."  
  
Everything comes into place. The hospital room is sterile -- no snakes on the ceiling. My artificial leg is there as it has been since they wired it up to my nerves, though the stump is pretty badly chafed. There are no feathers falling, and Caesar Flickerman is standing by my bed, glaring murderously at a guard. His hair is no longer the color of forget-me-nots, but violets. For a moment, I see him with a knife in his hand, but when I blink again, it's just a covered tray.  
  
He sits down beside me and uncovers the tray. There is a bowl of soup, and he feeds it to me without speaking.  
  
"Forget-me-nots are blue," I tell him. "Dandelions are yellow. You have to tell Johanna. It's dandelions that are yellow."  
  
Caesar looks at me, horrified. "What's your name?" he asks gently.  
  
I open my mouth to answer, but nothing comes out.  
  
"You know this. What's your name?"  
  
"Peeta?" I try. It seems right. I remember a voice saying, _Oh, Peeta._  
  
"That's right. Peeta Mellark. You're a baker's son, from District Twelve. Do you remember your girlfriend's name?"  
  
"Katniss," I tell him immediately.  
  
He nods. "Okay. Good. You haven't been answering for a few days."  
  
"My mother's ring is melted," I say.  
  
"Yes. Do you remember why?"  
  
"The bakery burned down?"  
  
Caesar nods. "Yes." He pushes my hair back from my forehead and doesn't make me talk anymore. He just sits there while things come back to me. My name. My father's name. Then my brothers and my sister-in-law and my niece.  
  
The burning of District Twelve.  
  
This takes most of the afternoon and evening. When I finally feel like myself again, I ask, "What happened, Caesar?"  
  
"I don't know. Snow won't tell me."  
  
I suddenly remember something else. "Darius!"  
  
Caesar shakes his head. "I'm sorry, Peeta. Darius died two days ago, while you were... out."  
  
"Johanna?"  
  
"Still there," he says bitterly. "I'm sorry I'm not a better ally."  
  
"What do they want? Did they ask me something? I remember they were asking Darius about the Mockingjay Project. I don't know what that is."  
  
"I don't, either."  
  
There's nothing more to talk about. Caesar stays until I fall into a normal sleep. I dream I am in the arena. The redheaded girl Finch, who Katniss called Foxface, is with me, and so is Kersey Green, the girl I killed after Cato and Glimmer left her gutted in the woods. Theirs were the only names in my kill column. They are trying to build me a shelter. Kersey has the drop spindle that her parents gave me to remember her by. She is quickly spinning something out of threads she takes from my head. The thing Finch is building looks like a house of cards. Kersey keeps secreting things away in the catacombs. I ask her not to, but she ignores me.  
  
Over the next two days, I get some of the story of what happened. Caesar came to see me on the day Darius died and found me muttering in bed, reciting recipes and talking about pigs. I was swollen and breathing shallowly.  
  
"Johanna said you started screaming during the blackout," Caesar tells me. "You were lucid for a few minutes, but then you started muttering. She started calling for me after a day of it. She wouldn’t shut up until the guards promised to get me."  
  
"Did they hurt her for it?"  
  
"I don't know. She won't tell me."  
  
They gave me some kind of serum, probably to try and force me to tell the truth, but I had an allergic reaction to it. I almost died.  
  
I am allowed out of my hospital room. Guards take me to the roof, and I realize it's the Training Center hospital. Further down, I see more guards surrounding a beautiful woman with long brown hair. She smiles at me heartbreakingly.  
  
"Annie Cresta?" I ask my guards.  
  
They don't answer, but I know. I watched her Games. I saw her interviews after them, when Finnick Odair was practically holding her up on stage. She goes to the edge of the roof and looks out. The wind tosses her hair and pulls her thin dress against her body. For a moment, I see Katniss there -- Katniss in her wedding dress, the dress that burned up to feathers on Caesar's stage. Her hands are talons.  
  
I blink, and she is Annie Cresta again, a pretty woman with a sweet, mad smile.  
  
My guards take me back to my room.  
  
I have a visit from a woman named Terena Blake, who is head of Snow's intelligence forces. They have lost their eyes and ears in Thirteen, and want me to somehow guess what Haymitch and Plutarch are planning. When I fail to give them so much as a reasonable theory, I am left in my restraints, sitting in a hard chair, for five hours until a doctor demands that my guards let me out.  
  
Caesar is sent in the next day to see if he can coax anything out of me. He brings food, and we go up to the roof. Annie is not here today.  
  
"I still have no idea," I tell him. "I didn't even know Haymitch was planning to break us out."  
  
"I think they know you have no idea," he says. "There's no reason you would."  
  
"Then why do they keep asking me?" But of course, the answer is simple: "It's just so they can keep hurting me, like they did with Darius."  
  
Caesar nods. "I don't know what Snow's planning, but I don't like this."  
  
I look around. The roof is as it always was, with the noisy air filtration systems, but I can't imagine why they'd let Caesar talk to me here, if it's still safe. I frown at him. "Caesar, are you pretending to be on my side, so I'll answer questions and trust you?"  
  
"I'm not pretending to be on your side," he says. "I _am_ on your side. That said, I'm with Snow on one thing -- I want to stop this war before it kills anyone else."  
  
I think about Darius, and his fingers and toes scattered in the hall. "Maybe it's time for a war," I say. "Maybe they should win it."  
  
Caesar looks at me steadily, then sighs. "They're not listening, if you're trying to be defiant. I told them I couldn't interview you with an audience, not for something like this."  
  
"I'm not trying to be defiant. I really think that." He doesn't say anything. "Come on," I say. "You help us. You said you were born in District Five. You can't think this is right."  
  
For a very long time, Caesar doesn't say anything. When he does, it's the last thing I expected. "I was born ten years after the Dark Days," he tells me. "It was still pretty grim everywhere when I was a kid. My name was Flynn then. Charlie Flynn. District Five is power. Believe me, the Capitol kept a close eye on us."  
  
"I'll bet."  
  
"My parents worked for the Capitol."  
  
I frown, not knowing where he's going with this. "Peacekeepers?" I guess, though this is obviously wrong -- Peacekeepers wouldn't be married with a child.  
  
"No. Commerce liaisons. It was the only work they could get after the war. They had a shop when my older brother was little, but no one would shop there."  
  
"Why not?"  
  
"Why do you think?" He looks out the window at the mountains. "Before the war, they'd been pretty vocal about not going to war. They were pacifists. My father was on the District Council, and he was always trying to fix the problems from inside."  
  
" _Problems?_ " I think about the fences, the Games, the constant spying, the stocks and gallows in District Twelve.  
  
He shakes his head. He doesn't need me to explain my incredulity. "It wasn't always like that. I'm not saying it was great, but before the Dark Days, people could travel between districts, and own land outside the fences. The Capitol took a lot of the production from the districts, but some stayed there. My father always argued that more should, and that the District Council should be elected instead of appointed. Things like that. A great talker, my dad. He died when I was nine."  
  
"I'm sorry."  
  
"Yeah, me too. They found him drowned under the hydro-plant." Caesar thinks about this. "Maybe it was an accident, like they said. I don't know. All I know is that the other kids in school said he got what was coming to him. People like him lost the war."  
  
"I--"  
  
"Mom died two years later. That was definitely not an accident. She left a note. Said she couldn't stand what the district was becoming. My brother had joined the Peacekeepers, so I couldn't stay with him. I went to the Community Home. The other kids were more like the ones in school."  
  
"And you hated them?"  
  
He turns, surprised. "No, I didn't. Would you? Did you hate the kids from the Seam?"  
  
"No, of course not."  
  
"And I didn't hate the other kids in the Home. Or the adults who made sure they got birthday presents and harvest meals, while they habitually forgot about me. Actually, I guessed they must be right. The Capitol was pretty harsh. My parents must have been wrong. I actually got very vocal about it -- how I understood everything now. How I realized that we should have won the war. How everything that was wrong in Panem was the Capitol's fault. I refused to see my own brother when he got a furlough and came back to town."  
  
"Did the other kids let up?" I ask.  
  
"Depends what you mean by it." He shrugs. "I started getting birthday gifts and harvest meals, at any rate. They loved having me get up and tell them how right they were." He smiles faintly. "I guess you know how that feels now."  
  
"Yeah, I do. Except I didn’t decide to do it. Snow's making me do it."  
  
"True enough. And I guess I thought, at the time, that I'd really made it. That they really believed I was one of them. I believed that right up until they voted me into the Quarter Quell arena."


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Caesar tells the story of his time in the arena, and Peeta makes the acquaintance of the The Mockingjay.

**Chapter 6**  
"You're a victor," I say.  
  
"Some victory, isn't it?" Caesar sighs. "I've managed to keep the Quell entirely off the air since we got a second Quell victor, and -- well, let's say I don't look much like I used to."  
  
"Why?" I ask. "Why would you... do this?"  
  
"I couldn't go back to District Five." He stands up and goes to the parapet. "The girl they sent with me was blind, Peeta. Useless in the plants, and no one wanted her. She barely made it off her platform before someone killed her."  
  
"Still..."  
  
"They had our coffins ready at the train station.  Fake ones, but they painted our names on them.  Kids from the Community Home who I thought were my friends taunted us on the way out. Two of the districts bet on their strongest kids -- District Two and District Four. District Eight decided to make its own Reaping ball and put everyone in with the same chance. Everyone else sent throwaways and people no one wanted. I remember standing there on my platform, looking around at them. We'd been training together. None of us was good for much. Two and Four were allies. It was pretty obvious that they meant to just mow us down.  
  
"I'd decided to ally with my blind district partner, a boy from Seven who'd lost his hand in a lumber accident, a girl from Nine who was dying already, the kids from Eight, and the poor kids from Eleven and Twelve who'd been shoved up onto the stage by their neighbors."  
  
"You were an ally of Twelve's?"  
  
He nods. "I didn't realize it at the time, because I didn't know anything about District Twelve, but it was the only time in the history of the Games that both tributes were merchants."  
  
"There aren't many of us. _Weren't_."  
  
"Funny how those odds turn against you when they vote, isn't it?" He sits down on the parapet and looks out across the Capitol. "I got everyone together during training. I was always good at talking to people, persuading them. Not that it took that much to get a bunch of scared, angry kids to talk to each other. We figured Two and Four would pick us off one by one if we were out on our own."  
  
He paints the picture with words. I've heard him prod tributes to do this, but I've never heard him do it himself. He falls into an almost musical cadence. I can see it all in my mind -- the sickly, angry, frightened kids gathered in the Training Center, in the cafeteria, looking across at the cruel gods at the Career table. Caesar -- Charlie Flynn -- sits among them. He doesn't describe himself, and I see him (certainly wrongly) as a smaller, skinny version of himself as he is now. He is fifteen years old, and he has an easy way about him, a casual leadership in groups that he doesn't even need to try for. Alone among them, he makes jokes. Many haven't laughed for a long time, and it comes out strange, even a little crazy. But it does come out. The Careers are suspicious of him.  
  
The plan is insane. He realizes this now. But at the time, it makes as much sense as anything else. ("We were kids, remember, and most of us bought that the people who were usually in the arena wanted to fight, and that the arena itself wasn't a weapon.") They will all leave in different directions from the Cornucopia and regroup at some landform. Caesar will choose it and point it out from the platforms. There, they will make a fortress. Let the people outside the alliance hunt each other. Their group will stay in the fortress, taking turns getting supplies. They will simply agree not to kill each other. There is no reason they can't just keep living in the arena. They won't have to die _or_ go back to their districts and the neighbors who had wished them dead. What could the Capitol do if they just refused to play?  
  
Amazingly, it works at first. Caesar's blind district partner is the only one of the alliance lost at the Cornucopia, and that is only because her helper can't get to her before the boy from District Four does. It was bad luck -- she was sent up into the arena already surrounded. As for the others, Caesar spots a high rock, easy to point out, and holds up four fingers, to show it is at his four-o-clock. The other tributes telegraph the message around, and they regroup at the rock, and go about a search for water while the battle at the Cornucopia rages. They find a cold mountain stream, teeming with fish (not even mutts, which, he assures me, they would have been in later Games). There is even a defensible cave system.  
  
The caves are the first mistake. Unlike the one Katniss found for us, these really are a system, and this time, it's the lair of a huge mutt. They lose two kids (the boy from Eleven and the girl from Nine) before Caesar and the girl from Twelve manage to set off a landslide to block it off.  
  
"What was her name?"  
  
"Who?"  
  
"The girl from Twelve."  
  
"Dorcas Bryce. Do you know the family?"  
  
"The Bryces? We're cousins someplace. Everyone is. Two or three times over, usually."  
  
He smiles. "Yeah, I guess they would be. I think Dorcas and the boy, Giddon Moore, were cousins."  
  
I can't place any Moores. Maybe he was the last of the boys. Then I realize, again, that there are no more of most of the people I knew. My distant cousins are as extinct as my brothers. I take a deep breath, and force myself back into Caesar's story. An arena seems safer than where I am now.  
  
He and his allies huddle in the cave for days while other tributes fight. They realize it's not going to be permanent when the stream abruptly dries up, leaving dead and rotting fish in the bed. They get hungry. He gets them to tell each other stories to take their minds off of it. The stories at first are depressingly similar tales from home -- all of them swear they will never go back to the Districts, no matter what -- but eventually, the girl from Eleven warms up to it and starts telling a tall tale about a mighty giant who beat the combines in a harvesting competition.  
  
"It was the first time they paid any attention to us," Caesar says. "People liked the stories. Sponsors sent us food. And do you know, before I became what I am, when I was still Charlie Flynn, the thing people asked me most often was to finish a story that got cut off."  
  
What cuts off the story is an attack by the remaining Careers -- the boys from Four and Two. They have already dispatched the other tributes, and they're done pretending to leave Caesar's group alone. They wait until night, when only one guard is outside the cave during the nightly storytelling. ("We'd gotten complacent," Caesar says.) The guard is Giddon Moore. They kill him with a single arrow to the throat, then set fire to the dry brush outside the cave.  The cave fills with smoke, and the alliance panics. None of them are fighters, though Caesar tries to rally them.  
  
They run out meaning to put out the flames and are met with deadly fire from the Career bows. Within minutes, Caesar's remaining alliance of six has been taken down to two -- Caesar himself and the boy from District Eight. They have managed to keep their heads, and they fight the smoke to take down the barrier to the rest of the cave system. Better to risk death with the mutt than deal with its certainty from the Careers. They fall down into the dark. Deep in the cave, the Gamemakers have put in some kind of eerie green lighting for the cameras. It flickers and makes it almost as hard to navigate as the dark did. The boy from Eight breaks his ankle. Caesar tries to help him, but when the mutt -- some kind of bear shaped thing -- finds them, there's no way to fight it and help his friend. The other boy pushes Caesar into a side cavern and screams, lurching into the mutt's path. Caesar can't move as he watches this.  
  
Finally, the mutt leaves, and Caesar continues through the caves. He comes out on a high ledge about a quarter of a mile from his old camp. He can see it clearly, because the fire is still burning. He is thinking of nothing now except revenge. The Career boys are cavorting in front of the cave. They will eventually have to try and kill each other, but for the moment, they're celebrating.  
  
There is a boulder at the top of the rock formation.  
  
Caesar pushes it.  
  
The Games end.  
  
"I had a little smoke inhalation," he says. "I wasn't even hurt. Snow was still the head Gamemaker then. He came to see me in the hospital and told me I could take my pick of the houses in the District Five Victors' Village. I told him he'd kill me before he sent me back to District Five. He said accidents could always be arranged. I did the first few appearances, then told him that I'd let everyone know he'd threatened me if he didn't start moving me toward Capitol citizenship.  That's when he was climbing up toward the office he's in now, and he couldn't afford it. We've had the same relationship since.  
  
"I spent the next two years living here, supposedly in line for citizenship, mostly doing talk shows with Candria Light -- she was the host of the Games before me, and she was always good to me -- and a few others. They gave the excuse that my talent was acting, and all of the projects to be done were in the Capitol.   You can still find a few of my old movies, if you search." He smiles. "A few adventures. A musical, of all things. Safe movies. But I wasn't setting anyone's world on fire as an actor. I was always better at the publicity runs than the actual performances."  
  
"My mom used to want to be an actress. She tried for the scholarship. She actually won it, but then… well, then there was my older brother."  
  
"I know. I found footage of her audition during your first Games. She was good. You were better. I opted not to bring that particular talent up, given the circumstances."  
  
"Thanks."  
  
He sighs. "Anyway, I was supposed to be an example of how someone from the Districts could make good in Panem. It didn't work if I wasn't actually _in_ the Districts. We finally came up with a compromise. I'd change my name. Charlie Flynn would disappear. Caesar Flickerman would get his Capitol citizenship. No one would have an accident, and no one would start spreading nasty rumors about our new president. And by then, I'd made it my business to get a lot more rumors. Candria announced her retirement and said she was training a boy from the Capitol to take over for her. I had several plastic surgeries, and took up Capitol fashion. I didn't show up on television until months after Charlie had disappeared. No one ever made the connection."  
  
I wait for him to continue, but he doesn't. I wonder how long it's been since he's talked about it. "Caesar," I say, "I get that it was bad in the districts. But you know what Snow does."  
  
He turns and looks at me. "I also know what angry people in large groups do."  
  
"What do you think we should do?"  
  
"The last thing any party in this entire business wants to do: Take it slowly. I think we managed to kill the Games. If it were up to me, I'd re-introduce the District Congress. Give everyone a hearing."  
  
"You said that wouldn't work."  
  
"It wouldn't, as long as Snow is power. He could propose a perfect solution to everything, and it wouldn't work because he'd be the one proposing it. But he's not immortal, no matter what he thinks. And if he dies, the bureaucracy will keep ticking away." He thinks about it. "There's not really a mechanism to replace him, you know. None of the schemers on the way up has his grip on the whole government. If he were gone, we could have an election. For myself, I'd nominate and campaign for Haymitch Abernathy, drunk or sober."  
  
"Haymitch? Really?"  
  
"He's smart. He's a rebel from an outer district who understands what's wrong, and I don't think he's one for purges. I've never gotten that from him."  
  
"When he's not drunk, he lies. A lot."  
  
Caesar raises his eyebrows and gives me a perfectly genuine grin. "Peeta, if I were you, that's not a stone I'd throw."  
  
I smile back before I think about it. I don't think I've smiled for a long time. It feels strange. Numb and kind of stretched. It must look all right, though, since Caesar doesn't comment on it. "So that's why you help the tributes," I say. "I mean, that you were one of us."  
  
"Yeah. That's why. But I believe in Panem. I believe we have what we need to make the changes we have to make. We don't need to start blowing things up. Except maybe Snow." He examines the skyline for a minute, then says, out of nowhere, "I'm going to get you out, Peeta."  
  
"What?"  
  
"I'm not sure how yet, but I'll find a way. I have a lot of friends in the Capitol. So do you. I stole your sponsor lists from the Gamemakers' files. You have more friends than you know."  
  
"Don't get them into this. Snow will hurt them, too."  
  
There's nothing else to say. Caesar dutifully prods me for any guesses I have about what Haymitch and Plutarch might be planning, so he can honestly say that he believes I have absolutely no idea.  
  
The next day, I am returned to prison. Johanna is screaming as I pass her cell, and I see that the guards are in with her, and she is soaking wet. They have their rubber boots and electric prods.  
  
The guards leading me smirk and push me ahead when I try to stop. Johanna continues to scream as I am locked into my cell.  
  
My mother's hand has shifted in its vat of liquid. It looks like she's beckoning me, crooking her finger at me the way she did if I had done something wrong.  
  
The videos start playing again. They have added Darius now, crying out as they demand to know more about the mockingjay project. The folder with Katniss's face on it is tacky with his blood, and the camera lingers on it lovingly. The folder catches in my nightmares. I find it in strange places in the fire, not burning. When I open it, there is a picture of Katniss in the rain (it's my painting of her, with mostly her eyes showing in the gray afternoon). It is stamped "deceased." There is a lot of information after it, but I can't read it.  
  
The days begin to blur into each other. There are the slow days, when nothing happens and I just watch the videos, out of boredom as much as anything else. There are the days when they come at Johanna with the prod, and she screams. I scream back at them to please stop. More than once, she knocks herself out before she can say anything. I hear the guards complaining about this and saying they have to secure her so she can't take this escape.  
  
There are days Caesar comes. These are the best days, because he bullies the guards into cleaning our cells and makes sure we have something to eat.  
  
There are the days Snow comes. These are the worst days. He brings things from Twelve. I haven't lied to him, so he has kept his word and not brought my niece's body again, but he brings things that prove he has been in my house, and Katniss's, and Haymitch's. Apparently, they left the Victors' Village intact. He has taken some of Haymitch's books from under the floorboard in the living room, and several pieces of jewelry from Katniss's collection. I doubt she'd notice them missing, since she almost never wears jewelry that she isn't forced to wear, and Snow says she hasn't been back yet, anyway. ("Believe me, we're watching for her. I've left her a gift.") Haymitch would probably notice the books, but from the looks of it, they didn't take anything really rare or old, so he must have hidden those better. I engage in my own private rebellion by reading them as soon as Snow leaves, ignoring the ever-present videos. From my house, he's brought my paintbrushes, but not my paints.   
  
It doesn't really matter _what_ he brings. It's all about how thoroughly he has invaded my life. How he can do anything he pleases with me.  
  
Next door, I sometimes hear them asking Johanna about the mockingjay project, sometimes about rebel plans. She is raving now. She says the rebels are planning a strike from space, and it will be led by mockingjays with little airtight helmets. She tells them that the rebels' secret weapon is part of Finnick Odair's private anatomy. She says that Haymitch can be in a hundred places at once, Plutarch can become invisible, and Katniss can fly. They have been shocking her so often that she may actually believe these things.  
  
They don't ask me anything. They don't break any more of my ribs, or even threaten me with breaking them. I'm not sure what they're after. Some days, they come in with needles, and I get shots that are horribly painful. After them, I drift in a nightmare world. My cell is on fire. Snakes come out of Haymitch's books. I am inside the videos. Katniss becomes a bird-creature again, with sharp talons, and she is hunting me. I swell up around the shots, and I see the mounds of flesh in a dozen different ways. One explodes like the volcano in Haymitch's arena. Another collapses like a worn-out mine shaft. My artificial leg tries to grow and consume me.  
  
As frightening as the images are, the worst part is the forgetting. I can see some creature trying to eat my leg. I can sleep in a bed of fire. I can even watch my body explode around me. But sometimes, I stand there inside the visions, and I have no idea why I'm there. I don't know who I am, or who I'm looking for. I have the folder in my hands and I know it's important to know the girl in the picture, but I can't find her name. I can't find my own. I don't know why I have burned body parts in the room with me. I am drifting, untethered to anything. As the shots wear off, I start to remember, but when the shots come close together, it takes longer. Sometimes, I haven't even completely come back between them.  
  
The world becomes strange and fluid. Events come up like a chain of islands. Johanna screaming. Caesar bringing me stew. Snow talking to a guard outside, saying that he's glad things are going the way they are. "Best outcome I could imagine. The Districts will destroy each other before they get near us here." A medic in my cell with me because I got too much of whatever they gave me in the shots, and stopped breathing again. It isn't Valentine. I ask for Valentine. The guard laughs, and his teeth seem long and sharp, like needles.  
  
Finally, they lay off whatever they're doing and a few days go by without any shots. My memories start to piece together more firmly. I know my name. I know Katniss's name. I know my family is dead. I ask Johanna how long we've been here.  
  
"Why?"  
  
"I just want to know."  
  
"I don't know," she says. "Couple of weeks, maybe?"  
  
Caesar comes in the next day and tells me that it's been closer to a month. I've lost a lot of days. I ask if he knows what they've been giving me.  
  
He shakes his head. "I don't. Whatever it is, I don't like what it's doing to you. Your hands are shaking."  
  
"They are?" I look down and see my hands. They don't look familiar to me. My fingers are too thin, and, like Caesar says, they are trembling. They've been doing it so long that I guess I haven't noticed.  
  
"Katniss is up and about," Caesar says. "Surveillance spotted her in District Twelve, with an escort from Thirteen."  
  
"How did she look?"  
  
"Snow sent a tape. Would you like to see it?"  
  
I nod.  
  
Caesar keys in some commands, and the constant fire in District Twelve is replaced with a blanket of silent ash. A small, dark-haired girl walks through it. She looks shell-shocked. She raises a talon.  
  
I shake my head. Katniss's hand is a hand again.  
  
The viewpoint switches to a camera hidden in her house. She comes into the kitchen, which is dusty but undamaged. She sits down and mumbles something to herself. I see my own name on her lips. She says, "What am I going to do?"  
  
She wanders her house for a little while, then her sister's cat appears out of nowhere, and she makes a project of catching him. I remember that she says she hates the cat. I think I have laughed at her about it, since she obviously is very fond of him in her own way.  
  
The video ends.  
  
I touch the screen.  
  
"Snow has decided to air your interview tonight," Caesar says.  
  
I frown. "My interview?"  
  
"The one we did when you first came out of the arena."  
  
I try to remember. There was something about a cease-fire. "Katniss will see it?" I ask.  
  
He nods. "That's why Snow waited. He wants to remind her that he's got you here."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"To try and keep her from doing anything foolish."  
  
"He doesn't know Katniss," I say. "Can I see her again?"  
  
He obligingly plays the video again, and while I watch, he calls for Valentine to look me over. She seems very shocked to see me. I wonder what I look like. There's no mirror in my cell.  
  
Snow himself visits me the next day, in Caesar's company. He inspects me like he's considering purchasing a half-burned cake. Finally, he grimaces. "All right," he says to Caesar. "You're right. This won't do." He calls the head of the guard and says, "See to it that the boy is fed regularly, and turn off the video feeds at night."  
  
"Might I suggest giving Johanna a reprieve as well?" Caesar says. "She's his ally. When she's hurt, it has an impact on him. If he's going to be lucid in the studio, you need to let him get stronger."  
  
"I'm going to the studio?" I ask.  
  
"We're anticipating an action from Thirteen within the next few days," Snow says. "We may need you to speak again."  
  
"I don't have anything to say."  
  
"These people are using the love of your life," Snow says. "You have nothing to say about that?"  
  
I don't. Katniss looks sad and confused, but she's in one piece. She's safe. They're taking care of her.  
  
I know I'll have to think of something, because if I don't, they'll start working down their lists of people to torture and kill, but my mind is blank. I am allowed to see my interview that night. I sound scripted. I remember that I meant to, but I don't remember why.  
  
A regular television feed is wired into my cell, and it gives me a reprieve from the videos, but I'm suspicious of it after a day. I watched a lot of Capitol television with Katniss when she was looking for the mockingjay in Thirteen, and I don’t remember it being so... directed. There are baking shows and painting shows, wrestling tournaments, movies made from books I've liked -- in fact, it's everything the Capitol has a reason to believe I'll be interested in, with the exception of the news reports that air on a regular basis. Some of these are fluff, but others report on rebel activity. Frightened Capitol citizens talk about what they'll do in case of emergencies. Images are shown of rebels captured in Eight. I don't know them, but I'm fairly sure the images are tampered with, since they look universally threatening.  
  
Two days after my interview airs, someone in District Eight sets fire to the mayor's house. Snow declares it an attack on a Capitol interest, and any attack on Capitol interests is deemed an attack on the Capitol. The next morning, he sends in bombers. It's aired live, and analyzed on the afternoon shows. District Eight is bigger than District Twelve, but it's all horribly familiar. Buildings falling in, people running and screaming. People trapped. I look over at my mother's hand.  
  
In the evening, there are problems with the feed, flickers in the picture, moments of dead air. The commentators apologize for the technical problems, but they look and sound spooked. This continues through the night, and finally the television feed to the prison is broken and my cell is blessedly quiet. I sleep.  
  
"What's going on?" Johanna asks through the vent the next morning. "I've been listening. I haven't heard the television since yesterday."  
  
"I don't know."  
  
"I'm more than happy to discuss it with you."  
  
I look up. Snow is standing at my cell door, looking furious.  
  
"What is it?"  
  
"Your friends in Thirteen have been busy," he says, and touches a button beside the door. "This has been airing in the districts since yesterday evening. We haven't been able to block it."  
  
The visual on my screen changes, flickers. The bombers disappear. The commentators disappear.  
  
Staring out from my screen, covered in feathers, ash, and blood, is Katniss Everdeen.  



	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Snow demands a second interview from Peeta, Caesar decides that it's time to get him out of the Capitol.

**Part Three: Victors**

**  
  
Chapter 7**  
I stare at her. She's carrying a shiny black bow. Her face has been made up carefully, but she's also covered with real ash and smeared with smoke residue. She's walking toward the camera with a limp. Her eyes are wild with fury, and her lower leg is bloody.  
  
They've dressed her in armor that looks like a bird costume. It's obviously one of Cinna's creations, of a piece with the parade costumes we've worn. I guess it makes sense that they'd go with a costume. She's being introduced to a new audience now, looking for new sponsors in an even deadlier game than the ones before.  
  
"I want to tell the districts that I am alive," she says. "That I'm right here in District Eight, where the Capitol has just bombed a hospital full of unarmed men, women, and children. There will be no survivors."  
  
Snow pauses the video. "They are using her to rally the districts to war," he says.  
  
"Why is she a bird?" I ask, though something in my mind is trying to snag on the Victory Tour -- mockingjays, like her pin, held up on signs. The mockingjay she said the women from Eight baked into their bread. Then I see her burning up on the stage, her wedding dress falling to ashes that become feathers.  
  
Snow doesn't answer. He just starts the video again. It shows the hospital being bombed, as Katniss said. Over it, she says, "I want to tell people that if you think for one second the Capitol will treat us fairly if there's a cease-fire, you're deluding yourself. Because you know who they are and you know what they do."  
  
"She's talking to you, Peeta," he says as the video shows several scenes of chaotic action that could come out of any Hunger Games playbook. "She saw the interview. You're the one calling for a cease-fire. She's telling the districts you're deluded."  
  
"If I thought you were going to treat the districts fairly, I would be. Maybe I am anyway, to go along."  
  
"You're deluded? You're not the one walking around a war zone in a chicken suit."  
  
"It's a mockingjay," I tell him.  
  
"Then you do know about the mockingjay."  
  
"I've seen mockingjays. And I've seen chickens. That's not a chicken."  
  
He smiles, then says, "Oh, here. It's my favorite part. Look who's got her back."  
  
I don't really need to look. I don't _want_ to look. But I look.  
  
Katniss and Gale are together. First he is defending her from rubble after a bomb blast, shielding her with his body. Then they are on a rooftop, shooting planes out of the sky. They're dressed as a pair. Like she and I were dressed for the tribute parades. I can't get the parades out of my head.  
  
Snow re-winds to the bomb blast, to Gale curling around her body, sheltering her. He pauses. Says nothing.  
  
I want to say that I don't care. I want to tell him that I want Katniss and Gale to be together, since I’m going to die anyway. I can't. I stare down at my shaking hands.  
  
Snow forces my head back up, and the video resumes with Katniss standing outside the hospital again, shouting passionately. At the end, she says, "Fire is catching! And if we burn, you burn with us!"  
  
Flames consume the screen, and the words "IF WE BURN, YOU BURN WITH US" appear, ignite, and burn the video away, leaving the screen black.  
  
Snow looks at the screen thoughtfully for a long time, then sits down across from me. "She's quite effective," he says. "There were riots within minutes of the first airing in some districts. Not, of course, District Twelve, which has already burned out." He points to my mother's beckoning hand. "My latest intelligence is that three hundred and thirty two people have died in riots in the last twelve hours.  Most of them are rebels." Snow waits for a response, which I don't give him, then looks at Caesar. "Get him ready. I think our little mockingjay deserves a response, don't you?"  
  
Snow leaves. Caesar sits down across from me. He looks like he hasn't been sleeping much. "Peeta," he says, "you have to do this."  
  
"No you don't!" Johanna yells. "She's got the fuse lit! Don't tamp it! It's the end for the Capitol!"  
  
"This war could be the end for everyone," Caesar says. "Johanna, think about it. How much more death do you want?"  
  
She doesn't answer right away, and I think she's not going to answer at all. Then she says, quietly and clearly. "I want them _all_ dead."  
  
I go to the wall. "Johanna, you don't mean that."  
  
"Don't I?" She gives a bitter laugh. "They killed your family, Peeta. Don't you listen about it being Katniss's fault. That's on Snow. He killed over a thousand tributes. Killed Haymitch's girl. And you don't even know what he's done to Finnick. You will pretty soon, though, unless he manages to make you too ugly for his little friends to want to play with. That would take some doing. You're a good looking kid. I bet they're already panting for you. Old women, old men, maybe a few young ones if they can scrape up the money. Who knows? They won't care much longer that you're supposedly taken. I wonder who he'll give you to first. Unless you count the whoring around for the cameras that he's already making you do. Maybe it won't even feel so different."  
  
"Johanna..."  
  
"Go. Do what they tell you. Finnick says it's easier if you just close your eyes and pretend you're somewhere else."  
  
I look at Caesar. "Is it true?"  
  
He nods. "We have to go, Peeta."  
  
I follow him out without speaking, surrounded by Peacekeepers. He puts me in his car. There's no room for an escort inside, and the Peacekeepers try to insist that I ride with them. Caesar tells them that he's under orders to prep me for the interview, and they shouldn't waste time.  
  
He locks the doors. "She's right," he says as we start to pull away. "And it's time to get you out of here."  
  
I look up. "What?"  
  
"We'll do the interview," he says. "Get you through prep. You'll feel stronger after they give you food and get you cleaned up and in fresh clothes. And it'll be easier for you to blend in if you're in a suit. I've been getting everything in place for the last week. I've just been waiting for a chance."  
  
"Caesar..."  
  
"I don't know what Snow has planned for you, except that he means to use you to hurt Katniss. He's going to do that by hurting you. Johanna wasn't lying about what they've been doing to Finnick. And I think..."  
  
"What?"  
  
He stares straight ahead. "I think that what they did to Finnick is the _best_ you could hope for if I don't get you out. So be ready."  
  
We drive for a little while -- it's a longer trip to the studio in City Center from the prison than it was from the Training Center, since we have to go through Snow's personal security checkpoints -- and I say, "Caesar, do you think Katniss knows about how many people have died?"  
  
"No."  
  
"Just that Snow bombed the hospital. And District Twelve."  
  
"I don't have any intelligence on what she knows, Peeta. But you know Katniss. Do you think she'd want people dying in pointless riots?"  
  
Given that she was willing to marry me -- to give up her whole life, essentially -- in order to stop the war just a few months ago, I doubt it. Then again, that was before the Quell. Before Twelve burned. "I don't know," I say.  
  
"Really?"  
  
"Do you know anything about Thirteen?"  
  
"Only from Snow. He's not the most reliable source."  
  
"What does he say?"  
  
"That the president of Thirteen is viciously ambitious. That she has absolute control over her people."  
  
"What does she do with it?"  
  
"Does it matter?" He waits, then says. "Why the questions about Thirteen?"  
  
"I just want to know who she's working for. Are they good people?"  
  
"I can't answer that. The only people I’m sure of are Plutarch and Haymitch. Haymitch is a good person. Plutarch..." He sighs. "Plutarch has a lot of good ideas about how government should be. He's a historian. But he's not very good with the small picture."  
  
I suppose it doesn't matter. I'm going to say what I’m going to say, no matter what. I'm going to do something to undermine her.  
  
But it's also a chance to talk to her, probably my last chance. Nothing I say will change things in the Districts, and Snow knows it. I'll tape this, and then, unless Caesar succeeds in getting me out, I'll most likely die. I want to say something I mean, even if it _is_ buried in what the Capitol wants me to say.  
  
And what I want to say is that I'm worried.  
  
The girl in the bird suit, screaming at the camera, barely looked sane. They're putting her in front of a movement, making her the face that will launch their war, and I doubt they're really going to let her know what it means. Haymitch, at least, knows how far she was willing to go to try and avert a war. Gale Hawthorne knows it as well. And if a Gamemaker is in charge, he'll know how to play her. How to make her do what he wants without thinking about the consequences she'll face. If she ever finds out that more than three hundred people have died because she made a video, I don't think she'll forgive herself.  
  
And I admit, I'm disturbed by the costume, the character they've made her into. They're working away at her humanity as surely as Snow is working away at mine, turning her into a mutt.  
  
A sharp pain goes through my head. The thought about mutts came out of nowhere. An image of the file that they waved at Darius flashes in my mind. The mockingjay project. Turning Katniss into a mutt. I think of the hallucination I had of Annie becoming Katniss, with talons for hands. The folder in my dreams with "Deceased" stamped across her face.  
  
Caesar slams on the brakes. "Peeta! Are you all right?"  
  
I shake my head, try to make the crazy idea go away. "I’m fine. My brain just went in a strange direction."  
  
A Peacemaker comes up beside us on a motorcycle and taps the window. Caesar lowers it. "No unapproved stops," the Peacekeeper says.  
  
"I’m sorry," Caesar says. "Peeta wasn't feeling well. We'll get moving again."  
  
The Peacekeeper signals to the rest of the convoy, and something bumps the back of the car enough to prod Caesar into moving. He rolls up the window.  
  
"Sorry," I say.  
  
"No. Don't be." He frowns, staring off toward the media district ahead of us. The training center looms up beside us as we pass it. "Where did your mind go?"  
  
I can't talk about it. I'm not sure I can even make words of it. The idea is breaking up anyway. I remember a little scrap of the thought, the idea of the folder with "deceased" on it, but it doesn't mean anything. It's a stupid thought, like thinking my mother's dead hand is beckoning me.  
  
We get to the studio five minutes later, and we're swept off to different prep teams. I'm happy to see Sergius, my regular skin tech. He has some fading bruises, but seems all right as he tries to cover the worst of the marks from prison. I hadn't realized how many I had until he looked at me with horror and started covering them. Claudia isn't there for my hair -- Sergius says she has three broken fingers, and can't work -- but the boy Aurelian comes back. He's let his hair grow out a little, and the blond curls are now topped by reddish brown roots. He has the whole mess tied back with a leather string. Over my hair wash, he tells me that Effie is fine, but people are angry at Katniss in the street, and he and his friends can't stop it. He and Sergius both tell me to hang in there and be strong.  
  
Once I'm cleaned, prepped, and polished, they leave me, and the door opens slowly. A Peacekeeper comes in and gives me a disgusted look. I try to get behind something. I've had enough of strangers looking at me naked.  
  
There is a full length mirror, and I see myself for the first time in a month. The only part of me that looks familiar is the artificial leg, which is still the same size it was before. Now, it looks huge beside the other calf, and under my thighs. My ribs, still bruised, cast shadows. My skin seems loose, somehow, like a suit that needs to be sized down. . My arms are still strong, but even they show the signs of weight loss, and as I look at myself, my hands begin to tremble.  
  
Even under the makeup, I can see that my face is a wreck. The loose skin makes me look older, and even the thick concealer doesn't cover up the dark, bruised look around my eyes. I can see the bright dots from the injections in several places, some still swollen into little mounds. My lips are treated with balm, but I can still see the cracks in them. It's my eyes, though, that seem most foreign to me. They are wide and round, and they seem to be moving a lot.  
  
I look like I'm waiting for someone to shoot at me.  
  
I forget this when the next person comes in. Dressed in prison grays and looking as wasted as I do, Portia is barely recognizable. She's lost a lot of weight, and her eyes are sunken.  
  
"Hi, honey," she says, and looks me over, compassion and horror mixing on her face. "Sergius said you'd lost some weight, but--"  
  
I throw my arms around her. "Portia! I'm so glad to see you. Are you okay? Have they hurt you?"  
  
She shakes her head, but when she turns to pick up a garment bag, I can see pressure sores on the backs of her arms, like she's been shackled to a wall. She walks like an old, frail woman. "You look just terrible," she says, and leans on the back of a chair. "Oh, Peeta, honey, what are they doing to you?"  
  
"They haven't done anything lately," I say. I don't tell her about the shots they give me. The shots hurt, but they don't do any long term damage, as far as I can tell. And complaining that I've been made to watch videos doesn't seem like much when I compare it to what they've been doing to everyone else. Even the bruises on my wrists from the thing Snow did with the handcuffs are gone.  
  
She dresses me slowly, then calls for her pins to make some alterations. I take off the suit (they allow me to keep the underwear on), and she is guarded very heavily while she makes the changes. The whole time she's holding scissors, one of the Peacekeepers puts a gun at my head. When the suit goes back on, it fits better, but Portia cries over every change. She pets my face oddly, then sniffs and says, "We'd best style you. You'll need a tie, and a tie clip. We can't use the mockingjay, obviously. Maybe not a tie. Maybe a scarf. It would cover the skin... the way it's loose..."  
  
She calls for Sergius, and between them, they manage to cover up the sunken look of my skin. I almost look like me.  
  
"Looks like he's done," one of the Peacekeepers says, grabbing Portia's arm. "Time to go back."  
  
"No!" She pulls away and throws her arms around me. "Don't let them hurt you anymore, honey," she says. "Don't you let them. Everyone loves you. Everyone! You don't let them hurt you! You--"  
  
She is pulled away from me. I grab her hands and give them a squeeze, but even they are ripped away. The door slams between us. I can hear the Peacekeepers marching her away.  
  
I go to the door. It's been locked. I hit it. "Portia! Portia, hold on!"  
  
There's no answer.  
  
I'm alone in the prep room. There is a television screen, but it's dark. I watch it warily, expecting it to come alive with my nightmares, but it doesn't.  
  
I sit down on the couch and stare at myself in the mirror. The longer I look, the less familiar I seem to myself. I close my eyes and try to draw a picture of myself in my head. It's nothing like the image in the mirror. It's not just the weight. I just can't make the connection between us. He doesn't even look like one of my brothers. He looks like someone I saw on television once. For a scary moment, I can't remember his name, or the name of the girl he loves.  
  
I think about the cuffs tightening on my wrists. I held on through that. I grab the sleeve of my jacket and pull it tight, pressing the cold metal buttons hard against my bone.  
  
I am Peeta Mellark. I love Katniss Everdeen. I'm here because she's being used by a hostile force to start a war, and I'm being used by an even more hostile force to stop one.  
  
I look in the mirror again, and recognize myself.  
  
Caesar comes to get me, and we go upstairs to the stage. The lights are on, and there are a few crew members around. A Peacekeeper stands guard.  
  
The cameraman stands in his usual spot and says, "You're on in five, four, three..." As usual, two and one are just signaled, in case they need to edit. They play the music, canned. They'll edit the proper version in later.  
  
When it fades, Caesar puts on his best host smile. Behind it, I see the boy who once hid in a cave with the other tributes, getting them to tell their stories. That boy's eyes are full of anger. The host says, "Peeta, I'm always glad to have you on my stage. How are you feeling?"  
  
For an instant, I'm afraid I won't be able to talk. But my mind doesn't betray me. I have to acknowledge that I don't look good. They'll never buy it if I pretend I'm fine. "Well, Caesar, I've been better," I say. "It's been a long few weeks."  
  
"I know," he says kindly. "For everyone. Are you all right being here?"  
  
I nod. "Are you?"  
  
He grins a little. "Peeta, we -- that is to say, everyone in the Capitol has been hearing rumors about Katniss Everdeen. That she was seen in District Eight, inciting riots. You know Katniss better than anyone. What do you make of it?"  
  
I look up. I could tell the truth here. I could say that I think Katniss means what she says. I could say that she's right, that Snow did bomb that hospital.  
  
Or I could tell the other truth. The one that won't get someone stuck here in the Capitol killed. The one that might even give her a chance after Snow mows down the districts and takes her captive.  
  
"They're using her, obviously," I say. "To whip up the rebels. I doubt she even really knows what's going on in the war. What's at stake."  
  
"Is there anything you'd like to tell her?" Caesar prods.  
  
I tell her what Snow wants me to tell her. I also tell her the truth -- that I don't trust the people she's with, and she shouldn't, either. That she should find out what's really going on before they manage to wipe out the rest of the human race.  
  
They cut the feed.  
  
I put my head in my hands. If Katniss saw that, she'll be gone forever, at least from me. The worst part is that it _is_ something I want to say to her. Something I want to actually talk to her about. I want her to convince me that she's doing the right thing, that Snow's putting lies in my mouth.  
  
But I doubt she'll speak to me again. She has Gale to talk to now, and he doesn't go on national television calling her a slave.  
  
Caesar puts a hand on my shoulder and says, "I'll drive you back."  
  
The Peacekeeper in the studio gets on her personal comm, and by the time Caesar and I reach the garage, our honor guard is there. They don't look as tense as they did on the way here. Of course not. I'm compliant. Caesar's compliant. No danger here.  
  
Caesar gets behind the wheel and I strap myself into the passenger seat. Once the doors are closed, he says, "Strap in tight. It's going to get bumpy fast."  He pulls out of the parking garage to an area behind the presidential mansion, and starts going around toward the City Center.  
  
"Where are we going?"  
  
"I'm not going anywhere. You're going to the train station. I have friends in more places than Snow thinks. They'll get you to Eight in a shipment of ammo. You have friends in Eight. Cecelia's husband will meet the train. He has friends in the rebellion. They'll get you to Thirteen."  
  
"What about you? Snow will kill you."  
  
"So will the rebels. I have a better chance with Snow."  
  
We pull slowly out of the garage, our escort tight around us.  
  
"I'll help with the rebels..."  
  
"You'll have a hard enough time convincing them that _you're_ not a traitor." He glances over. "Wash off the makeup before you get to Eight. Let them see all the marks on you."  
  
"Caesar, I can't just--"  
  
Suddenly, we are next to the City Center and Caesar steers hard to the left, knocking away two of our guards. One of the motorcycles goes up in flames. The other skids into traffic.  
  
"Hold on!" Caesar yells.  
  
The car spins into the City Center, knocking down vending booths and lights. We slide under the shadow of the government tower, and the next thing I know, we're speeding through some dark, cramped tunnel. Workers scatter. Something shoots out from the wall, but all I hear is a clank on the side of the car.  
  
Caesar takes a sharp right, going down further to a wide street that mimics the streets above. "Keep your head down," he says. "I don't know what they're going to shoot at us."  
  
"Stop it!"  
  
"It's too late." He jams on the accelerator, and we speed up a side tunnel, back out into the sunlight. We're on the far side of the city center now, coming up around the Training Center. With a deliberate jolt, he crashes through a wooden fence and skids to a stop. "Unbuckle," he says. "We're getting less obvious transportation."  
  
I fumble with the latch on the seatbelt, my shaking hands betraying me. Caesar comes around and pulls me out with a jerk. We run into the shadows beneath a statue. Caesar watches intently.  
  
"What are waiting for?" I ask.  
  
"A friend."  
  
In the distance, I hear the hum of motorcycles. I look up at the Training Center, at the roof, and I want to be there, in the day Katniss promised I could live in forever.  
  
A flutter of green cloth catches my eye.  
  
"Annie Cresta," I whisper.  
  
"What about her?"  
  
"Caesar, if I disappear, what happens to her? Or Johanna? Or my preps and Portia? What happens to you?"  
  
"I'll do what I can for them, Peeta, but if you stay here, they're going to break you. I won't let that happen."  
  
"I can't let them die. We have to get them!"  
  
"I'll try, but--"  
  
"No! Caesar, the second I disappear, they'll kill Johanna. They'll make it as bad as they can. And they have Portia in jail. They can get to her any time. And Effie!"  
  
Caesar looks at me, shaking his head. "Peeta, you can't go back. You can't. He won't just kill you. He'll make you wish he had."  
  
"I'm a few steps ahead of him there," I say. "Caesar, thank you. And I'm sorry."  
  
"Sorry? What are you sorry for?"  
  
I stand up and grab him by the lapels of his jacket, throwing him out into traffic. I hear brakes screeching around him.  
  
I run out into the Capitol.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Peeta rejects escaping, he is subjected to punishment.

**Chapter 8**  
I don't know where I mean to run. If they don't catch me quickly, other people will pay. I'm going to have to make it seem like I forced Caesar to get away from the guard, but I don't know how yet. Hopefully, I'll have a chance before they kill him.  
  
I run down the main path of City Center, where the chariots come during the Games. Somewhere above, I can hear myself asking Katniss who the people she's working with are, and if she trusts them.   
  
My heart is beating too fast, and the shaking I've seen in my hands seems to be in my legs as well. I trip over a stone and nearly fall flat, only catching myself at the last minute.  
  
"Hey!" someone shouts from a few feet away. "It's him! It's Peeta Mellark!"  
  
I look over my shoulder. Now I can see the screen above the square, my interview rolling on. I am standing here, in the same clothes, still made up. Hard to miss.  
  
I hear the clicks of a hundred cameras, then I'm surrounded. Hands grasp at me, avid eyes glare up into mine. Questions come from everywhere at once.  
  
_Are you safe? What are you doing about the war? Is the baby all right? Where is Katniss? Did she break up with you? Will you fight for the Capitol? Do you still love her? Will you marry me instead? Did you win the Quell?_  
  
My head spins. The hands seem to be coming out of nowhere, floating in, touching me all over. Someone jabs me in the ribs, where the bone hasn't healed yet. Someone else knocks on my artificial leg. There are fingers on my lips, my sides, my chest, my thighs. I try to back up, but there are people behind me, too, and I lose my balance. One of the hands tugs at my hair, and I feel a piece of it torn away. There are faces behind the hands, but they don't seem connected. They smile, revealing sharp, bright teeth. The eyes are black, like dolls' eyes. The skin seems to be melting, shifting...  
  
Warning gunshots break into the din and I hear several screams, then Peacekeepers grab me roughly and drag me to my feet. The shoo away the crowd, which now seems very small, maybe fifteen or twenty people, even though they took up the whole world a minute ago.   
  
"Not so easy to get away, is it?" one of the Peacekeepers growls. "Cassius ended up in the hospital. You're not going to get it so good." She twists my arm and shoves me forward at the same time, dislocating my shoulder.  
  
"Stop it!" Caesar screams. He is pushed up to me by the crowd of Peacekeepers guarding him.  
  
"Lived through it, did you?" I ask, trying to sound as hateful as I can. "Old man can't even keep control of his own car. All it took was one square hit."  
  
"Peeta!"  
  
"He actually seemed surprised," I say. "Like he really thought I was just going to go back because he said so."  
  
The Peacekeepers look confused by this, but they let up on the pressure they've been holding onto Caesar with.  
  
We're shoved into separate cars and driven not to the prison, but back to the President's mansion. It's only on the far side of the square, but they're not taking any chances. We go under a heavy gate and come up into the rose gardens. Beside a fountain, the convoy pulls to a stop, and Caesar and I are both dragged out and pushed into the shadows of the breezeway between the public house and the private areas. We're directed toward the private side of the place. There is no time to marvel at the opulence of the rooms we're shoved through. It makes the public half of the mansion, where Katniss and I once danced, look like a miners' bar on the Seam.   
  
At last, we're manhandled through a heavy wooden door and deposited in a large, lush room dominated by a mahogany desk. The door slams behind us and I hear the lock engage.  
  
"I'm sorry, Caesar," I say quickly, guessing that we're bugged. "After everything you did to try and help me. I betrayed you. I just saw a chance to escape. I couldn't help it. I'm sorry I grabbed the wheel and hit you. You don't have to pretend it was anything else. I get it. I mean... thanks for trying, with the Peacekeepers, but you don't have to fall on your sword for me, and I doubt it'll make a difference. I know what I did was wrong."  
  
"Peeta," he starts, but doesn't follow it up. He goes to a stained glass window and pretends to look through it.  
  
There is a large globe of the word beside the desk. It shows the Capitol in red, each of the districts in blue (except Thirteen, which is in black), and the rest of the empty world in gray. There are a lot of pink dots, marked with numbers. I have to think about it before I realize that they must be arenas. The pink dot marked "75" is southwest of the Capitol, in the empty space between the Capitol and the ocean. The one marked "74" is very close to District Seven. Haymitch's Quell is right outside the Capitol itself. Caesar's is near District One. I turn the globe aimlessly. Many of the early games have their arenas outside of Panem. Mags's games look to be on a cold plateau in Asia. The first Games were in South America. The fifth were in the north part of Africa. Only one of the later Games -- Johanna's -- took place outside Panem. It's smack in the middle of Europe. I remember that it was a ruined city.  
  
I touch the faraway lands, imagining what they're like, wishing I could just dive into the globe, pull my friends with me, go someplace that's empty and safe. I wonder which of the islands is Ireland, where my family came from. None of it is labeled, and all they ever taught us in school were the continents. Dad always looked for books with pictures of Ireland, but we never found any. He just said that his grandfather had said that _his_ grandfather had said that it was supposed to be very green and pretty once, though the memory had already faded over the centuries. Even after the sea flooded across parts of it, it was still lush... right up until the plagues hit. Maybe the plague is gone by now. Maybe I could fly to Ireland through the skin of the globe, and take Katniss with me, away from the rebels, away from the Capitol. _Away_.  
  
If only I knew where it was.  
  
I let my hand skate over the globe, my fingers shaking. I can't seem to look away from it. I turn it, away from Panem, away from most of the pink dots. Africa. Australia. Asia. What did we do to ourselves? Why are they gray and empty, with no cities or countries marked on them? How could twelve billion people disappear? Why did everyone left board the rescue carriers? Why not stay and make a go of it?  
  
Or maybe they did stay, but some ancestor of Snow's hunted them down in the merciless arena of the devastated world. Maybe they died off naturally over the years, their small populations dwindling past the point of feasibility. Maybe they're still out there, hiding, waiting to be found again. I trace a long river in Africa and imagine happy people who've never heard of Panem. Maybe there. Or maybe in the long line of islands that runs between Asia and Australia. Maybe in the wreckage of Europe. There have been arenas in all of those places, and there are no reports of suddenly finding neighbors, but maybe they were just smart enough to stay far, far away.  
  
I want to believe this, but I don't. We may not be able to fly above the clouds the way we used to, but there's nothing wrong with communications, and wasn't before the Catastrophes. Panem was good once, at the beginning. I do believe that.  There'd be no reason for people to have hidden back then. And I don't believe that anyone has been in hiding for hundreds of years.  
  
I don't know how long I've been staring at the globe, letting my mind twist along strange pathways, when the door to the study opens and President Snow comes in.  
  
He looks at Caesar. "Don’t imagine for a moment that I believe a single lie out of this boy's mouth. I know what you did, Charlie."  
  
"Are you going to throw me in prison with the others then?"  
  
"No." Snow wrinkles his nose. "No, I think I’m just going to keep a much closer eye on you. Right here. And you're going to be in front of the cameras so much you'll think you've been a private citizen for the last fifty years. So you'd better hope the rebels don't get any traction." He nods over his shoulder and two Peacekeepers come in to march Caesar out of the room. Two more flank the door and stay inside with us.  
  
When he gets to the door, Caesar grabs the edges and calls back, "Peeta! Hold on! Concentrate!"  
  
The Peacekeepers drag him out into the hall and slam the door. I hear the flat sound of him being hit with something.  
  
"You don't need to hurt Caesar," I say. "Don't you have enough people to hold against me?"  
  
"As long as the Capitol stands," he says, "Caesar Flickerman will stand with it. Don't imagine anything else."  
  
I look down. "I came back. Don't hurt anyone. Please."  
  
Snow sits down at the desk, unconcerned. "Where did he tell you that you'd go?"  
  
"One of the districts. I don't remember which."  
  
"Eight?" Snow guesses. "I know the family of that girl from the arena last year saw you on the victory tour. Were they going to help you?"  
  
"I killed their daughter. Why would they help me?"  
  
"Do you remember what I told you would happen if you lied to me again?"  
  
"I asked a question. I didn't lie."  
  
"The question implies a lie." He leans forward. "Who did Caesar have working here in the Capitol? I know they have people in the prison. "  
  
"Caesar's not a rebel. If you have rebels, he doesn't know them."  
  
"Caesar is the most dangerous kind of rebel -- the kind who thinks he's not rebelling," Snow says, but doesn't elaborate or accuse me of lying. "Now, I suggest you tell me who his collaborators are."  
  
"I don't know."  
  
"Think carefully about this," Snow says. "Because right now, your two choices are being useful to me on your terms, or on mine."  
  
I clamp my jaw shut. No matter which option I choose, someone will pay for it. Cecelia's husband, or Kersey Green's family in Eight. Whoever Caesar has on the trains will be found, and however he reached Eight will be learned. They've already lost a hospital full of unarmed men, women, and children there.  
  
If I choose not to cooperate, it will be Johanna and Annie and Effie and the others taking the brunt of Snow's wrath. I know what Johanna would say.  
  
I close my eyes and imagine building a card house. One card at a time. Effie, balanced against Cecelia's husband. Johanna, against Mrs. Green.  
  
Suddenly, I hear heavy footsteps. My arms are grabbed and I'm dragged backward.  
  
I open my eyes.  
  
Snow looks at the Peacekeepers holding me and says, very calmly, "Don't mark his face. I'll need them to recognize him."  
  
He turns away, and they drag me outside, shove me into a car. They don't even wait to get to the prison.  
  
The woman in back with me -- the same one whose friend apparently ended up in the hospital after the chase earlier -- grabs an electrical prod and jams it into my side. The pain is searing, huge, and paralyzing. My muscles clench. I can feel electricity dancing over the wires in my artificial leg, and the signals it sends my brain are confused and muddled. I can see it there on the floor of the car, perfectly still, but my brain feels it thumping up and down.  
  
The Peacekeepers don't ask me anything as they take what seems the longest possible route to the prison. I can see through the windows of the car, though no one can see in. As the prod strikes me again, a little girl with a clip-on braid wanders by, pushing a doll in a stroller. She is eating a blue ice cream cone. It's dripping over her hand.  
  
The Peacekeeper with the prod reaches for the back of my head, but the driver says, "If you burn his hair, Snow will kill you." Instead, she jabs it against my inner thigh and holds it there until I scream. Without pausing, she moves it to the seam of my leg and fries the connecting circuits. The nerves tell me that my foot is on fire. She calls me vile names, but I barely hear them over my own screams.  
  
By the time we get to the prison, there is no chance of me walking. Each of them grabs one of my arms, and they drag me through the back entrance, near the yard. I see men and women gaping at me. A woman with brutally short strawberry blond hair runs to the fence and screams, "Peeta! Peeta! You let go of him, you monsters, or you'll have trouble! I'm a Capitol citizen and I'll _make_ trouble!"  
  
I know the voice. Somewhere, echoing in my head, I hear her say, _It's a big, big, big day!_ I manage to lift my head and look at her. "Effie..."  
  
"Peeta, what are they doing to you? Peeta!"  
  
But I'm dragged away before anyone can answer. From the corner of my eye, I see one of the guards on her side of the fence pull her away and throw her into the mud. Other people in the yard laugh, and I hear it echoing after me until the Peacekeepers slam the heavy door of my ward. The window on Johanna's cell is open, and her face is pressed up against it. "Peeta!" She snarls at the guards. "You're going to pay! I'm going to make all of you pay!"  
  
My cell door opens and I'm thrown roughly inside. The videos are playing again. On one screen, I see that Annie Cresta has been moved to the cell across from mine. They have put caged jabberjays in with her, and she is sitting in the corner naked, rocking back and forth with her hands over her ears. I can't hear what they're saying. It's not for me.  
  
For me, there is the bombing of Twelve. The deaths of my family. But most often, shots of me in the arenas, first opening an artery in Kersey Green's neck, then slicing Brutus open and laughing while his blood covers my hands. They even cut in the fight I had with Clove to demand entrance into the Career alliance.  
  
And my father says, _Oh, Peeta._  
  
I push myself up on shaking arms and crawl toward my bunk, dragging my useless leg behind me. In some interview or other, Brutus calls me a rock on Katniss's apron strings, and says I'll get her killed if she doesn't get rid of me.  
  
I reach the bunk and try to pull myself up, but my fingers encounter something cold and metallic. I look up. There is a coffin on my bed The sides are set with thick windows between metal supports.  
  
Floating in the preservation fluid is Brutus, the wound from my knife open like an accusing mouth. His head has been tipped backward to make it look even worse. I can see the gristle and muscles in his neck, the tubes of his esophagus and trachea.  
  
The knife I carried through the arena lies beside him.  
  
I don't know what sound I make. I hear it, but I don't recognize it. It's a sort of a low growl, with a funny whining note over it.  
  
Whatever it is, Johanna hears it. She slams her hands against our shared wall and demands to know if I'm all right. Someone hits her.  
  
I fall back to the floor, trying to keep my face down, to not see anything.  
  
A scoop comes down from the ceiling, like the one in the arena that they use to gather up corpses. It drags me across the floor, slams me into a wall, and turns me over.  
  
On screen, I kill Brutus again, and my father says my name. I stare at the wall across from me, the wall where my mother's hand beckons, and I scream. My niece's body is there, preserved and set upright, lit by the harsh light of the cell. Beside her is my brother's head.   
  
Standing beside them is another coffin filled with fluid, a glass topped coffin lit by its own tracks of light, lighting up her smooth olive skin, making shadows of her floating braid. She is wearing the uniform we trained in last year, before we ever went into the arena.  
  
There is a bullet hole through the center of her forehead.  
  
"Katniss," I gasp, trying to find a way to explain it to myself. Why they would have dressed her in the uniform from last year. Where they'd found her. "Katniss, no..." I crawl across to her, pound on the coffin. She shifts, and I see what I'm not supposed to -- a tiny bit of chip in the plastic on her arm, a cut that will never bleed.  
I sigh with relief and fall at the base of the coffin. I don't know what Snow means by putting this here, and I don't care. It's not her. It's just an art project.  
  
"Peeta!" Johanna yells. "What is it? What are they doing?"  
  
"Plastic," I tell her. "She's not dead."  
  
"Who's not?"  
  
"Katniss."  
  
There is long silence, then Johanna says, "Peeta, what are they doing?"  
  
"I don't know."  
  
We can't talk anymore because the guards grab Johanna, and I hear her start to scream again. On my screen, I see Annie Cresta muttering, "Stop it, stop it, stop it..." while she presses her head against her knees.  
  
I close my eyes and cover my ears. Think about a card house. Try to build it slowly. Carefully. Concentrate. Lean one thing against another. Balance. No more shaking. Breathe deep, slow breaths, careful not to stir the air. Build it up a level.  
  
My breathing slows down.  
  
My mind starts to clear. There are two bodies in here with me, and, for some reason, a large plastic doll made to look like Katniss.  
  
What are they doing?  
  
The truth is that I don't know. I should know. I need to understand what Snow is trying to do, or I won't be able to stop him.  
  
There is no possibility of sleep that night. The lights remain bright. The videos emit loud sounds, and if I start to drift off anyway, I'm jostled by something that comes down from the ceiling.  
  
By morning, when the man with the needles comes, every part of me already hurts. Without my leg, I couldn't run even if I had somewhere to run to, and I have no chance when the guards grab me and cuff me to the table. There are needle pricks back and forth under my neck, and after them is a time of pain and terror. I see Brutus rise up from his coffin and offer me my knife. My brother's head speaks to me. My niece becomes the baby Katniss lost when she blew out the forcefield, the baby she killed when she blew out the forcefield. I kneel at her coffin and yell "Why?" but she doesn't answer.   
  
People step out of the screens. My father says _Oh, Peeta_ and turns away from me. My mother screams at me through Brutus's mouth, calling me a useless waste, saying I don't stand a chance of staying alive, and I don't deserve one. Katniss kisses me in our cave, and when she draws back, her mouth is full of fangs and her eyes are black bird's eyes. She watches me sleeping, holding a knife. I can see that she wants to use it, to cut the rock from her apron strings, but I'm still useful to her for sponsors.  
  
I shake my head. Remember the beach. Remember her pushing me down into the sand, kissing me, devouring me...  
  
I can hear Johanna still, but her words are distorted, like she's shouting through a tank of water.  
  
At last, the world goes blessedly black, and I drift through a strange dream world, accompanied by Kersey Green, who is spinning yarn on her drop spindle. She begins to wrap me in a cocoon of it.  
  
"What are you doing?"  
  
"Shh," she says. "I'll help you."  
  
It's what she asked me for -- to help her -- when she wanted me to help her bleed to death on the forest floor. I want to tell her that I don't want to die, but I can't seem to talk. She wraps up my feet, my knees. Finch from District Five carefully places nightlock berries in the wrappings.  
  
I'm awakened by a sharp kick to my ribs.  
  
"Now, then, I’m sure that's not necessary."  
  
I look up. Snow is standing in the door to my cell, smiling.  
  
I push myself up to sit. The ceiling momentarily becomes a nest of snakes, but I blink and it goes back to normal, though I think I'd prefer the snakes. "Now what?" I ask.  
  
"They've been in Twelve again," he says. "Would you like to see the surveillance photos?" He doesn't wait for an answer. He pulls out grainy pictures, obviously taken by an automatic camera, probably set in the fence. They skid across the floor to me.  
  
Katniss is sitting beside Gale on a rock outside the fence. They are smiling and feeding each other berries. They're both beautiful and whole.  
  
I look down at my ruined leg, at the bruises all over me, and I start to cry. I hate myself for it, but I can't seem to stop.  
  
"They certainly seem happy, don't they?" Snow asks. "And why shouldn't they be? They have a wonderfully effective campaign going!"  
  
He throws more pictures at me. Toxic waste from a train. Burning food supplies. Dead people. Everywhere, dead people. "What?" I say. "What do you want from me?"  
  
"We're going to need to make a statement about all this," he says. "You know this isn't good, don't you? Not for us, but even less for the districts. Of course, I suppose I could just let them all eat each other alive. Close up the Capitol, let the barbarians have at it. We'd be fine here."  
  
"You have nothing the districts don't send."  
  
He laughs. "Oh, we'd have less than we're used to, certainly. But we have gardens. A lake to fish from. Back-up power supplies that will last long enough for the districts to subdue each other. I assure you, we'd survive. The districts ascribe more importance to themselves than they really have. There's not a single one we can't compensate for."  
  
I look down at the pictures of Katniss and Gale laughing. The picture of the toxic spill has fallen over the corner of it at an angle, and it looks like the sludge is about to pour out onto Gale's boots.  
  
"But," Snow goes on, "I see no need to let so much of the human race annihilate itself if we can help it. So, you'll be going back on tonight. We'll need to tell the districts why we've decided to put a final end to this uprising."  
  
"What?" I manage.  
  
"Have you ever kept a garden?" he asks.  
  
"No."  
  
"I have, all my life. Weeds are the bane of a gardener's existence. The only way to destroy them is to go for the root. Tonight, I plan to go for the root."  
  
"Thirteen," I guess.  
  
"As always." He shakes his head. "They've brought it on themselves. You'll be explaining that tonight."  
  
"No. Katniss is there. Everyone from Twelve. Haymitch. Finnick."  
  
"And they've thrown in their lot with people who are destroying what's left of humanity." He orders the guards to put me into a wheelchair, and personally pushes me out. "After we air your statement, we'll show the end of the war live."  
  
"Peeta, don't!" Johanna screams. "Don't!"  
  
But I have no choice.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peeta is pulled into his last interview in the Capitol, warns Thirteen, and is broken.

**Chapter 9**  
"Warn them!" Johanna screams. "You'll be live! Warn them!"  
  
Snow pauses as he walks out into the hall in front of the guards pushing me in a wheelchair. He nods to another guard and says, "Bring Miss Cresta as well, if you would."  
  
"Leave her alone!" Johanna screams. "Let her go! She never knew about this any more than Peeta did!"  
  
She may as well not have spoken. Snow moves on without looking at her, and as I'm shoved out, I hear Annie screaming as she's dragged from her cell.  
  
We are thrown into the back of a car together. Annie is still naked. I want to give her my shirt, but I'm cuffed and can't get to it. "Hey!" I say. "Would you guys cover her at least?"  
  
I don't expect anything, but one of the Peacekeepers actually blushes and passes back his white coat. Annie wraps it around herself. In the close quarters of the car, this requires a little squirming around, and it brings her close to me. She puts her face close to my ear and whispers, "Katniss isn't alone there."  
  
Her voice is shaky, and I have no idea what she means by telling me this. She can't explain, and when she draws away, she looks pale and shaky, as though she's guaranteed herself a night of whatever they're doing to her by saying it. I shake my head, but she just puts her hands over her ears and leans forward over her knees.  
  
We are taken to Snow's mansion, back to the room where Caesar and I were held. There is a large green screen, in front of which is a podium, set on the white-tiled floor in front of the fireplace. Cameras are pointed at it. Computer screens show a map of Panem. Caesar, looking too thin and badly scared, is sitting in a tall chair, under guard. Annie is shoved into a chair beside him. He reaches over and pats her hand.  
  
I am pushed into a small room off to the side where a prep team I don’t know dresses me and powders me. Nothing they do makes a big difference. A medic comes in and re-wires my leg, but I know there's something wrong, because it won't stop jittering. This is apparently a problem of some magnitude, because producers and cameramen are called in, and finally, Snow himself.  
  
"Some of the circuits in the leg are melted," a director tells him. There's no way he can be standing beside you at the podium."  
  
"Who was authorized to destroy the leg?" a producer demands.  
  
"No one was." Snow grimaces. "Very well, leave him in the chair. I doubt that anyone left in Thirteen would buy that he's uninjured at any rate. Tomorrow, we'll release information to anyone left that he tried to escape. Did some damage to his leg."  
  
The director apparently doesn't care about stories to explain my predicament. His concerns are more immediate. "The wheelchair is too low. I won't be able to frame the shot properly."  
  
"Find a way to fix it, Mr. Henderson. I have more important matters to attend to." Snow sweeps out.  
  
For the next hour, technicians rush around, trying different things. A doctor is called from the hospital, and he declares the leg beyond rescue outside of surgery, where various chips will need to be replaced. There is no time for this. They try putting me in a brace that they attach to a pole, but the leg keeps moving, jittering me away from the spot where I'm supposed to be. Finally, they find a high chair with a metal rung. I can't get into it independently, and there's certainly no way I can get out of it. I am manhandled into the seat, and a clever production assistant uses the brace to secure me to it, in case the incessant movement of my leg tries to throw me. It still makes a weird, staccato ticking noise against the rung, and an emergency sound crew is called in to figure out how to muffle it.  
  
Annie Cresta has been given a hospital gown while they've worked on me. She and Caesar are sitting on the floor together a few feet behind the cameras. Snow's personal guards are holding guns on them.  
  
I hear a hum, and there is a sharp pain just under my ribs.  
  
The brace is electrified.  
  
"Just a precaution," a tech says. "As long as you don't deviate from the material, I won't need to do that. And your friends will be fine." He nods amiably toward Annie and Caesar, for all the world as though he hasn't just threatened their lives.

I'm handed a sheaf of papers, describing the various horrors of the war, and I know I'll be expected to talk about them. I read them. It's hard to focus, and sometimes the words seem to float up off the paper, and the images come to life in flickering shadows around me. The worst part is that I'm absolutely certain that the information is true. This isn't a game. The rebellion really has done these things, and I really am disgusted by them.  
  
Twenty minutes before air time, Snow comes in, dressed in a dark suit with one of his white roses tacked to the lapel.  
  
"Coriolanus," Caesar says, "why are you doing this here? Where is Prisca?"  
  
"She's in her room. This is no place for a child."  
  
"She'll hear anything you do."  
  
They go back and forth on this, much longer than they need to. Snow seems annoyed by it. I try to put it together. The only thing I can think of is that Caesar believes Snow won't kill him with their granddaughter to consider.  
  
That doesn’t mean he won't kill Annie. Or hurt Caesar.  
  
I can't put it together. I hear Annie again, in the car, _Katniss isn't alone there._  
  
The argument is finally settled one way or another, and Snow comes to the podium and starts arranging his notes.   
  
An aide rushes up to him. "The missiles have launched," he says. "They should reach District Thirteen in three hours. The war will be over by morning."  
  
"At the very least," Snow says, setting  up a small screen on the podium where I can see little dots tracking the missiles, "our most organized enemies will be dead by morning. Don't imagine that the violence will stop immediately, though hopefully, Mr. Mellark here will be of use in that endeavor." He jerks his head back toward me without much concern.  
  
"I'll warn them," I try to say, but the words stick in my throat. I see the guns pointed at Annie and Caesar. I think of Johanna and Effie and Portia and my preps.  
  
Snow finishes what he's doing and looks at me. "Peeta, I won't script you, but I strongly suggest you stick to the images you will see just beyond where Caesar and Miss Cresta are sitting. You've read the file. You'll know what to say."  
  
"They'll break into your broadcast," Caesar says. "You said they were filming in Twelve yesterday. What do you think it's for?"  
  
"They may break into District feeds," Snow says. "The Capitol is safe. And if they do break in, it hardly matters, does it? We'll be broadcasting live from Thirteen in three hours anyway."  
  
"I'll--" I manage.  
  
Snow looks at me mildly. "You'll what?"  
  
"Warn them," I say.  
  
"I don't think so." He frowns. "But just to be safe, perhaps a little control." He pushes a button on the podium, and a minute later, a guard from the prison comes in with a syringe.  
  
"No!" I yell.  
  
The brace around me gives me a jolt, then tightens.  
  
"Not much," Snow says. "I need him coherent."  
  
The needle jabs me at the base of my neck, and hot, bright pain spreads out. It's not like the other times. The room doesn't waver. I don't start imagining things talking to me. But everything is bright and echoing, like the world on the edge of sleep, when you can't quite get there.  
  
The producer holds up his hand and says, "We're on in five, four, three..." His fingers finish, _...two, one..._  
  
"Good evening, citizens of Panem," Snow says to the camera. "This crisis has gone on too long. I have with me Peeta Mellark, victor from District Twelve. Peeta, what would you like to say?"  
  
Behind the man holding the gun on Annie Cresta, a picture of a broken dam in comes up, with the date, statistics, and location beside it. The words "cease-fire" appear. Beside it, I can see the map that's undoubtedly projected on the green screen behind me, the location of the dam flashing. On Snow's private screen, I can see the progress of missiles as they crawl slowly toward District Thirteen.  
  
"We need to stop this war," I say. "We need to call a cease-fire. Immediately. On both sides."  
  
Annie's head is yanked back, the gun pressed to her temple.  
  
I go back to the non-script. "This dam was destroyed in the riots in District Seven. More than two hundred people died." The picture switches to the derailed trains, and I see the picture in my cell again, lying over the feet of a laughing Gale Hawthorne as Katniss feeds him berries. The only times she fed me berries were to drug me or threaten to kill me. I clench my teeth. Both times, it was a game to save my life. "This train in District Six was carrying industrial waste. It's polluted the ground-water supply. People in District Six are sick. Seventy-eight people died in the rebel riots there." The picture changes. "In District Eleven" -- I see Chaff in my head, Chaff falling down in the arena, just before I grab Brutus by the head and cut his throat. I swallow. "In District Eleven, the year's harvest has been substantially destroyed. The Capitol has enough to live on, but what will the districts live on? They--"  
  
The map disappears suddenly, and Katniss looks up and says my name.  
  
I stop talking.  
  
She is surrounded by grayish-white ash, and is standing in front of a melted oven. "Peeta, this is your home," she says, and as she speaks, I see her fingers curve, harden into talons. "None of your family has been heard of since the bombing. Twelve is gone. And you're calling for a cease-fire? There's no one left to hear you!" Her eyes darken and turn black. She seems to reach out of the screen, and I see my family, laid out in my cell, lit up by the lights in their coffins. I see my mother's hand, beckoning me as Katniss's does, but blackened and charred, with her ring melted across her fingers.  
  
"Get it back!" Snow yells at the booth. "Get it back, now!"  
  
He turns on me. "She dares talk about your family? She's the one who killed them. You keep going, before you and she are responsible for more death."  
  
With a flickering of the lights, our feed is back on. There is a picture of a water purification plant. I try to remember the information about it, try to say something, but then there is a burst of static, and Annie Cresta cries, "Finnick!"  
  
Finnick Odair looks out at the camera. He is carrying a picture of Rue, the girl Katniss buried in flowers in the arena. "We remember," he says. "We remember Rue McKissack, this beautiful little girl, murdered in the arena. She loved music. And dancing. She climbed trees." In my mind's eye, I see Finnick in his Games, as I watched them when we prepared for the Quell. He netted his victims. Speared them. Just like Rue.   
  
The techs get control again, and Snow doesn't bother trying to make me talk. Instead, he just shows pictures of the devastation from the war.  
  
They cut in again, showing Katniss walking among the wounded in Eight.  
  
We take over, and Snow says that Eight was only bombed because of the rebellion. They cut in with Finnick talking about Cecelia. Snow accuses him of sending Mags, his own mentor, to her death just to save "the mockingjay." Gale appears and talks about the bombing of Twelve. All he has time to say before Snow gets control is, "It's all gone."  
  
There is either blood or berry juice on his mouth.  
  
I look around the room. There is chaos in the production booth. Snow is furious. One of his guards says, "Should we shoot them?""  
  
Snow shakes his head.  
  
I wonder why.  
  
Finnick cuts back in, talking about Annie's district partner. Annie wails.  
  
And I understand. I am not being held because of what I can do. I'm being held against Katniss. And she isn't alone. Annie is being held against Finnick.  
  
Snow won't kill her as long as she's of use to him.  
  
He won't kill Caesar because of their granddaughter. Maybe he won't kill Effie because of Haymitch. And maybe he thinks Portia and my preps will control me.  
  
He gets control again, and rails about the wanton destruction of human life in the war, the cost of maintaining control.  
  
Katniss comes back onto the screen. She says, "If we burn, you burn with us." And then I see her in flames. I see her floating in the coffin in my cell. I see her lying in the mud, feathers growing in place of her hair, a bird-mutt, the way the other tributes were turned into wolf-mutts after they died.  
  
I close my eyes and try to make the image go away. It's crazy. I was with her almost to the end. She's human. She held me and kissed me and I was her whole world for a few minutes.  
  
On screen, I see the shiny black feathers falling down over her shoulders.  
  
I shove my hand into my mouth and bite it, and reality comes back. Katniss is just sitting in the ashes of Twelve now. But I can see the other, shimmering.  
  
"Cut the feed!" Snow commands. "Now!"  
  
The screen goes blank, then the national emblem comes up on it, with a long, low whine beneath it. I see Caesar pushed to the floor. Annie is standing up against the wall. Her eyes are open too wide to be natural.  
  
"We've got it," a tech says. "I can't promise how long."  
  
Snow speaks coldly. "Clearly, the rebels are trying to interrupt the dissemination of the truth when it's inconvenient for them. We will resume our broadcast when security is restored."  
  
I look over Annie's shoulder at the screen showing the missiles approaching Thirteen. Security will be restored when there is no one left there to threaten it.  
  
"Peeta," Snow says. "Do you have any parting thoughts for Katniss Everdeen?"  
  
I tear my eyes away from the screen, trying to push away the strange, nightmare image in my head. "Katniss," I say. I try to catch my breath. She's human. She loves me. She... I... "How do you think this will end?" I ask her. "No one is safe. Not in the Capitol. Not in the districts." I stare at the missiles. "And you..." The picture of her in Twelve comes into my head again -- smiling, feeding Gale.  
  
_Oh, Peeta,_ my father whispers in my mind, and I hear it. I hear it with my ears. I feel the puff of his breath as he speaks my name.  
  
I realize that it doesn't matter.  
  
It doesn't matter if she fed berries to Gale. It doesn't matter if she caused the bombing. None of it matters, because she is not alone there.  
  
"...in Thirteen," I say. Snow turns on me. If I don't say it now, he will make sure I never do. It sticks in my throat. If I'm wrong, then I will kill everyone he's holding against me. But even that doesn't matter.  
  
I clench my teeth, then say, "DEAD BY MORNING!"  
  
"End it!" Snow yells. "End it now!"  
  
A picture of Katniss flashes onto the screen, standing in front of the hospital in the bird suit. The techs wrest it away and I see us live, but the camera has been hit, and it's now just showing the tiles and part of the wall at a strange, skewed angle.  
  
Katniss's image comes back.  
  
Is sent away. "Listen," I try to say. "Listen, we have to stop this, we have to stop all of it, we have to--"  
  
The brace around me sends out a horrible jolt of electricity, then releases. The guards pull me off the chair and throw me to the floor. I feel my nose break, and see my blood splatter across the tiles.  I turn over just in time to see a wooden club coming at me. I try to squirm away, but my leg won't take my weight. It comes down and breaks another rib.

On screen, I see Katniss again, and her eyes are black.  
  
The lights go out. The screens go dark. Someone has cut power.  
  
A flickering emergency light comes on, and Snow's guards grab me, drag me to him.  
  
"It seems," he says, "that Miss Everdeen wants a word with you. And you with her. Don't worry. You'll see her soon enough." He takes out his pocket handkerchief and daubs blood off the corner of his mouth. He looks at the guards and hisses, " _Break him_."  
  
"No!" Caesar screams. "Coriolanus, you have to stop this! You're not doing Panem any good!  You're not even doing yourself any good!"  
  
"I can't count on him to state our case," Snow says as the guards drag me to my wheelchair. "So you, Caesar, will be back on the air tomorrow. And every day until this is over."  
  
"I will not!"  
  
"You can't help this one anymore," Snow says. "But unless you want Miss Cresta to find herself with a good deal of company in the near future, you will do exactly as you're told."  
  
I don't know what Caesar says because I am tied into the wheelchair and shoved out to a waiting van. They don't secure me, and the ride back to the prison is a thumping, jarring nightmare.

By the time they drag me out, I'm nearly unconscious from the pain, but they don't let me slip under. One of them jabs me in the newly broken rib, setting that wound on fire. I'm jostled deliberately as the go down the hall, and thrown out into my cell. I lurch across the room with no control over my legs, and crash down against Brutus's coffin. The liquid moves, and the head turns to look at me. I hear myself laughing madly in the night, almost feel his blood running over my hands.  
  
I crawl away. My hand lands in a basket that I don't even recognize at first. It seems to be full of nightlock berries. Then my head clears, and I see that they are the cards Caesar gave me, the gift to help me concentrate. I take out a pack, but I can't open it with my shaking fingers.  
  
Next door, Johanna screams, and the lights flicker as they start to shock her again.  
  
I fumble out another pack of cards. The cardboard rips when I try to open it, and the cards fly all over the floor of my cell. The three of clubs skitters across to the wall where the coffins are. I follow its progress, look up at my mother's beckoning hand. My brother's head. My niece.  
  
Katniss.  
  
I turn away. Katniss isn't dead. I just saw her. She talked to me.  
  
I pull myself over to the table. There is something new under it. A briefcase. It's emblazoned with Snow's initials.  
  
He must have left here earlier.  
  
I reach out and touch it.  
  
Pull my hand back.  
  
I look at the wall again.  
  
He's destroyed enough of my things.  
  
I pick it up and throw it. My broken rib screams at the effort.   
  
It isn't latched. Files and papers float out. One heavy file lands right in front of me. Darius's blood still covers part of Katniss's picture.  
  
The folder is labeled "Mockingjay."  
  
I open it. The first picture in it is Katniss after her training evaluation, just before they gave her the eleven. She is kneeling on the floor of the evaluation room, held up by two Peacekeepers.  
  
She's been shot in the head. There's a splash of gore behind her.  
  
I shake my head. "No," I hear myself say. "No, it's not..."  
  
I try to turn the page, but I can't get hold of it.  The corner tears away and I see a picture of a blackbird and some scribbled notes.  
  
The cell door opens and guards come in. They take the folder and throw it away.   
  
The woman who shocked me in the car is back. "That's not for your eyes, traitor," she says, then pushes me into the chair. Handcuffs come up on their chains, and my wrists are secured. Needles jab me, over and over.  
  
There is pain. It comes from everywhere at once. The shots, the prod, the cuffs pulling down on my wrists. My leg is on fire. The noise from the videos is too loud.  Bright, colorful apparitions materialize around me and then disappear.  
  
They ask no questions.  
  
They don't mark my face any more than it's already been marked.  
  
They burn me with hot metal coins. Cut wires in my leg. Hang me by my arms from a bar on the ceiling for what seems an eternity.  
  
And every two hours, a new set of shots.  
  
The walls of my cell boil and drip. On the screens, I see Katniss... always Katniss. I see her digging me out of the mud, and the mud boils around me while she makes me bathe in it. I see her dropping tracker jackers on me. The swarm around me in the cell, stinging me over and over. I see her hovering over me in the cave, her eyes as black as coal.  
  
I see the painting I made of her. I don't know whether it's there or not -- the gray, haunting picture of the girl in the rain. Her eyes -- her real eyes -- look out at me, and they aren't the same as the eyes of the girl in the videos.  
  
Sometimes I hear Johanna screaming beside me, and I see her covered in blood, kicking at Wiress.  
  
Snakes crawl out from Brutus's body, twining around him, hissing at me until he is nothing but a sculpture of snakes, a writhing mummy. The baby stares out at me. She has my eyes. She is dead. I remember telling the audience about her, about how we never should have had her.  
  
More shots.  
  
I see someone familiar, an old man with white hair, and he is laughing. Then there is the woman in the green gown, weeping, and the screaming from next door.  
  
The noise is constant, horrible. High whistles and crying children. I can smell my own waste in the cell around me. Things are taken and returned. The Mockingjay file remains.  
  
I can't read it. The water and blood have obscured it. There are only pictures. Katniss dying. Some laboratory. Katniss with feathers for hair.  
  
A stamp that says, "Deceased."  
  
My hands come across the pile of cards and I try, desperately, to remember how to put them together. Hold up one. Balance another.  
  
My hands can't even grasp them.  
  
I finally pass out, and in the fireland of my dreams, I walk the streets of District Twelve with the people I've killed. Brutus, wrapped in snakes, screeches at me in my mother's voice. Finch tells me that there's a way out, that she knows it and can show me, and she offers me a handful of nightlock berries. We are on the rock where I saw Katniss and Gale feeding each other, and Finch tosses one of them at me. I duck and fall off, and Kersey Green catches me, wraps me in yarn and says, "Be safe, Peeta. Be safe."  
  
I wake up and find my cell filled with roses, the same ones that were strewn on Caesar's stage. Snow stands above me. "She's alive," he says. "I gave her the same gift. The best from my own gardens."  
  
Then the flowers are gone, and the world is pain and terror again.  
  
I feel myself hanging over an abyss, a coal-dark mine that goes on forever.  I know that in that darkness, there is no time, no knowledge.  There is only fear.  Only the visions.  I hold tight to a string of cards that suspends me.   
  
They show me the death of my district. They show me Katniss and Gale, caught kissing by a security camera in her house. They show me my brother going up in flames, and my mother disappearing in an instant.  
  
I try to hold on. I imagine her on the beach, or in the cave. I try to remember what it felt like to be her world.   
  
There are more shots. More nightmares.  
  
The bridge of cards collapses.  
  
I fall into the abyss, and whatever waits for me there.

 

**The End**


End file.
